Spiced Honey Cake

Spiced Honey Cake is Dorie Greenspan's version of pain d'epices, a French spice cake traditionally made with rye flour.  Dorie's recipe uses lavender, peppercorns (Sichuan, white, or black), ginger, and orange peel for spicing, and all purpose flour instead of rye.

I left out the lavender and used black peppercorns, fresh ginger, orange peel and local honey.

The batter was difficult to mix, much stiffer than muffin batter.  If I make this again I will try using less flour.

The recipe suggests adding dried cherries.  I went with the raisins that I had on hand.

The cake bakes at a low heat, 300 degrees, for 75 to 85 minutes.  I wrapped the finished baking in plastic and left it for several days before cutting a slice.  The flavor is strongly orange.  I could not taste the pepper or ginger.  As other bakers commented the cake is dry, and would likely be good toasted.

The great thing about this recipe is the number of variations possible.  I can see trying it again with tea, different spices, a stronger flavored honey, or other dried fruit.

Christmas Spice Cookies

Christmas Spice Cookies is a recipe from Dorie's Cookies that uses the Do-Almost-Anything Vanilla Cookie Dough as a base.

We started by making half a recipe of the cookie dough.  There was not quite a cup of flour left in the bin, so we used white cake flour and all purpose whole wheat flour to make up the required two cups of flour.  We had ample supplies of the other ingredients:  butter, sugar, salt, egg whites, and vanilla extract.

The spice cookie recipe is written for 1/4 recipe of the cookie dough, so we doubled all the spices (cinnamon, ginger, clover, and allspice) to work with the half recipe we had made.

We rolled the dough between pieces of parchment paper as instructed, froze it for an hour, and then cut out the cookies with cookie cutters and baked them.

The baked cookies were darker than the cookbook photo due to our use of whole wheat flour, with a delicious buttery and mild spice flavor.  The next day we used pastry brushes to top the cookies with melted white chocolate chips.  White chocolate has such a mild taste, and it combined beautifully with the crisp, tasty cookies.

Chocolate Truffles

It was a choice of chocolate truffles or spiced honey cake for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie.  I made the truffles, and am looking forward to baking the honey cake soon.

Never having made truffles before, I was surprised at how simple they are to make.  Melt some chocolate, bring cream to a boil and add to the chocolate, stir gently, add butter, stir some more, add light corn syrup - that's it.  This lovely chocolate mixture is chilled for a few hours, shaped into balls, rolled in cocoa, and you are done.

The only difficulty I had was with the butter.  I stirred the butter into the chocolate in four or five additions, as Dorie suggests in the recipe.  When I got to the final addition the butter just didn't seem to want to mix in.  It was like there wasn't room for any more butter.  I stirred for awhile and then put everything in the fridge.  Today when I went to roll the balls of chocolate there were some pale spots on top that I think were unmixed butter.  The whitish portions dispersed as I rolled the chocolate into balls and did not mar the final product.

Dorie's recipe includes a number of flavour variations.  I want to try the ones that add texture to these truffles - coconut, peppermint, and cookie crumb all sound good.

Pfefferneusse

I've eaten pfefferneusse in December, but never made them before.

It was fun to use all the spices (cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, cardamon, and mustard!) for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe from Dorie's Cookies.  The cookies are easy to put together and baked up exactly as the recipe says.

The flavour is really good, perfect for a cold, snowy day.

It was a couple of days before I had time to glaze the cookies and take a photo.   The pfefferneusse will be a lovely addition to my cookie plates this month.

Rice Pudding and Spiced Hibiscus Syrup

I noticed the recipe for rice pudding and spiced hibiscus syrup when I first got Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi over two years ago.  I saved tea bags to make the syrup, but missed making the recipe with the Tuesdays with Dorie group back in June.

Today's rewind was the perfect opportunity to finally make this dessert.  It's been awhile since I've made rice pudding, but the stirring of the rice with milk and sugar was familiar.

The spiced hibiscus syrup was unlike anything I've ever made.  In addition to the expected water, sugar and vanilla the recipe calls for peppercorns, cardamon pods, orange peel, and dried hibiscus flowers or hibiscus tea bags.  The unusual flavour of the syrup is a nice contrast to the milky, vanilla rice pudding.

Caramel Tart

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie posting is the Caramel Tart from Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi.

The crust is made with the Sweet Tart Dough that we have used before in other Tuesdays with Dorie recipes.  I chose to pat it in my brand new tart pan rather than rolling it.  I'd like to get more comfortable with rolling dough, so maybe next time I will try that.

Not having made caramel before I was feeling hesitant about attempting the filling.  I followed the recipe directions as written, with the exception of substituting two whole eggs for the four egg yolks, and it worked out fine.  There was a little bit of solid caramel that I scooped out, leaving a golden brown liquid caramel.

The tart took a few minutes longer to bake than the recipe suggests, perhaps because I used whole eggs.

The flavour of the finished product is good, and would be enhanced with whipped cream.

Peanut Butter Change-Ups

This week I tried out a second recipe from Dorie Greenspan's new book Dorie's Cookies.  Peanut Butter Change-Ups are a peanut butter cookie baked as a mound rather than squished down with a fork as is usual.

The dough is very easy to mix up.  The addition of nutmeg is unusual, but I couldn't taste it in the baked cookies.

I set the oven temperature slightly lower than what the recipe states, and watched the cookies closely.  Despite this caution the bottoms were too brown when I took the cookies out of the oven.  Peanut butter cookies have a lot of fat and I often have this over browning problem, even with using light coloured pans lined with parchment paper and baking in the top part of the oven.

I used my grater to take off the brown bottoms.  The cookies looked and tasted fine and no one was the wiser.