Apple Pielettes

After baking twice a month with the Tuesdays with Dorie online baking group for the past year I am feeling a bit more confident when it comes to making crusts.  I was looking forward to making Apple Pielettes this week.

The crust for these little pies is Galette Dough, which Dorie says is flaky like American pie dough with the butter flavor of French tart dough.  It is easy to make in a food processor.

I cut the bottom crusts using a mug and fit them into the muffin pan as instructed.

For the filling I improvised, using what I had on hand:  an apple, raisins, apple butter, and freshly made cranberry sauce.  I was only making half the recipe, so one apple seemed like enough to work with.

I cut the top crusts with a glass and fitted them onto the little pies after moistening the the edge of the bottom to stick them together, and baked for 45 minutes.

Pie juice leaked out between the top and bottom crusts which made it a little difficult to get the pies out of the muffin pans.  I was able to extract all six without tearing the crust, and we have been enjoying eating them.

If I make these again I would use more apples and less raisins, and add the dried apricots.  It was fun to bake these little pies.

Tiger Cakes

Tiger cakes are small cupcakes made with almond flour, chocolate and a lot of butter.  That is what the Tuesdays with Dorie baking group made this week.  The recipe is on page 197 of Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan.

The tiger cakes are easy to mix up and bake.  I am enjoying all the recipes from Baking Chez Moi that use almond flour.  After reading comments mentioning difficulties getting the cakes out of the mini muffin pan I was careful to grease my non stick pan well.  All the cakes came out fine.

I iced one cake warm from the oven with chocolate chips and kept the rest bare.  The cakes are good, but a bit too rich for me.  Perhaps some orange zest or cinnamon might tone the richness down.

Apple Kuchen

This week the Tuesdays With Dorie online baking group made Apple Kuchen:  a Tall Apple-Custard Tourte.  This recipe is in the Simple Cakes sections of Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi but I wouldn't categorize it as a simple recipe.

First you mix up a crust in the food processor, roll it out, chill it, and fit it into the pan.  Mine was kind of messy and perhaps not as thin as it should have been, but surprisingly I was able to press it into my ten inch springform pan without too much difficulty.

The filling is a mixture of graham cracker crumbs and melted butter, topped with 3 pounds of chopped apples.  That was more apples than I realized when I first read the recipe.  It took me awhile to cut them up.

The crust and filling bake in the oven for 15 minutes and then the custardy topping of eggs, sugar and cream is added.  The recipe says to bake for 60 to 70 minutes.  Mine was in the oven for an hour and 20 minutes.  Because of the time it took to chop the apples and the extended baking time I had to leave before the final step of adding sugar and melted butter to the top and broiling.  I don't know how long my cake was under the broiler, but it came out tasting delicious.

Jam-Filled Sandwich Cookies

The online baking group Tuesdays With Dorie made Jam-Filled Sandwich Cookies from Baking Chez Moi this week.

The cookie dough is a mixture of confectioners' sugar, butter, white sugar, flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt.  In the recipe Dorie says the dough will be crumbly while you are mixing, and then will come together and "just about clean the sides of the bowl."  I mixed and mixed for 15 minutes or more and this never happened.  I added a little milk and then pressed the dough together with my hands, and then rolled it as directed.

I was concerned about the delicate nature of the dough, but as suggested in the recipe refrigerating it makes it easy to roll out and cut.

My cookies were probably a bit thicker than the 1/8 inch in the recipe.  I used apricot jam and a round cutter just over 2 inches.  The jam leaked out a bit when I added the second cookie on top.  I used my finger to clean it off the cookie sheet to avoid burning.

I sprinkled the tops with sugar mixed with chai spices.

My oven runs a little hot, so I baked at 345 degrees for 15 minutes.  Some of the cookies came out a little too brown on the bottom.

My yield was 12 round cookies plus one canoe shaped cookie that I shaped out of the dough scraps.  I ate that extra cookie right out of the oven and it tasted really good.  My taster says these are the best cookies he has ever eaten.

Bubble Eclairs

When I was a small child, before my mother had so many children, she used to make eclairs and cream puffs.  I was interested and curious to see what it was like to bake eclairs myself for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie recipe.  I especially wondered about the filling, if I could recreate the yellow filling that I remember.

I followed the recipe as written, and it wasn't that hard.  I spooned out 12 eclairs and baked as directed.  My oven light only turns on when I open the oven door, so I wasn't able to watch the eclairs rise.  At the end of the baking time they were all puffed up, but the ones in the centre of the pan fell within a minute of leaving the oven.

After reading about the options for filling the eclairs I chose to make pastry cream.  I think this is what my mother put in her eclairs.  The milk boiled over and putting the cream through a sieve was also pretty messy, but otherwise everything worked fine.

In the end these eclairs were very much like what I remembered from my childhood.

Cherry Crumb Tart and catch up

Cherry Crumb Tart from Baking Chez Moi is the latest group baking project for Tuesdays With Dorie.

Because I had some catching up to do I made two batches of Sweet Tart Dough.  But then when I washed the food processor I noticed that a small piece of hard plastic had come off the top.  It could have happened weeks ago but I didn't want to risk feeding anyone hard plastic shards, so I threw the two unbaked crusts out.  I made the Cherry Crumb Tart and catch up Apricot-Raspberry Tart crustless.

Dorie suggests pitting the cherries with a chopstick.  I wasn't able to get this working for me and instead split and pitted the cherries using a small curved fruit knife.  The pitting went very fast.  The filling and the streusel were easy to make.  I baked in a square glass dish, pulling the dish from the oven when the streusel was just starting to look toasty.

The end result was likely less rich than the original with crust recipe, but delicious.  One taster commented on how luxurious it tasted.  When we ate the last of it two days later the cherries had lost some of their taste so in future I would make this for consumption within a day as noted in the recipe.

Next up was the Apricot-Raspberry Tart, sans crust.

I made the Apricot-Almond Cream Bonne Idee version, thinking that the almond cream would replace some of the heft lost with the crust.  I picked the last of the raspberries growing outside to add to the apricots on top of the almond cream.  Again I baked this in a square glass pan because I was going to a potluck and the dish has a nice lid.  The flavour of the end product with good, though perhaps a bit too sweet (did I sprinkle too much sugar on top?) and very soft.  With a smaller dish and less baking time this would have been even better.

Making these recipes was a revelation for me.  I had never baked with cherries or fresh apricots and never knew how good they taste in fresh, home made baking.

One more catch up.  I made the Vanilla-Mango Panna Cotta two weeks ago along with the group but never posted it.

I have made panna cotta before and love how easy and elegant it is.  With a vanilla bean to flavour the heavy cream and milk it was just superb.  I substituted lemon juice for lime juice in the mango puree that goes underneath the panna cotta.  I don't like lime, but perhaps I used too much lemon juice or not enough honey.  The mango puree was too sour for me, but other tasters liked it.

Chocolate-Cherry Brownies

Chocolate-Cherry Brownies are what the Tuesdays With Dorie online baking group made this week, from Dorie's latest book Baking Chez Moi.

This easy recipe produced a very rich brownie.  I used dried cherries and cooked them in coffee and water, rather than the wine or port and water in the recipe.  The cherries are soft and luscious in the finished brownie.  I was glad I made the effort to get the cherries because they really make the brownies seem extra special.

The recipe uses more chocolate, 10 ounces, than I would usually put in a brownie.  So it is lovely and full tasting.  I can't really taste the black pepper.

I baked this for 36 minutes which is longer than the time in the recipe.  It took that long for the top of the brownie to lose its shine.  If I make these again I will experiment with baking for a shorter time to have a more fudgy texture.