Croissant Dough Named Charlotte

Picture Perfect Croissants. (I didn't make these.) 

I've become a fan of the British Baking Show, which I learned about from my sister-in-law Laurie and have been watching on and off for a few years. It's a lot of fun, putting amateur bakers to the test making new and challenging recipes.

My friend Deb and I were chatting recently and said how much we both would like to try to make some of the more challenging recipes they attempted. One of the most challenging ones was croissants. There is a lot of rolling, turning and folding, and tons of butter, followed by chilling, more folding and turning, etc. So we decided to try our hand at it.

Deb looked up a bunch of recipes and we ended up going with one that came out of a 1961 New York Times cookbook. We started on Thursday at her house, making the initial dough, rolling it out and adding in all the butter. Then it chilled overnight in her frig, and we picked it up again at my house the following night. 

Deb arrived at our home and announced that the folded, flat bit of dough had been dubbed Charlotte. Charlotte was about to get a working over now that she was at my house. Deb continued the process of rolling, turning and folding, which is supposed to incorporate the butter through all of the layers so that when it bakes it puffs up into all those delicious flaky layers.

My favorite part of the recipe is when it says "cut into triangles," which I have determined is the most passive-aggressive direction ever written in a recipe. Do you have any idea how to cut 18 triangles out of a square piece of dough?I do, but only because I've purchased Pillsbury croissant dough in the past and saw how it had been scored and rolled so carefully into that little tube. 

We managed to get 19 little tiny croissants out of the dough, which was supposed to make 18 croissants, so we considered that a success. We put it into the oven with the temp sent to "proof" and waited for them to rise. And waited. And waited. And they rose...a little bit. You could tell by the seams that they were indeed attempting to rise, but alas, they were not doubling in size.

Ready to start rising! Aren't they cute?! 

Do these look like they're rising? 

After a couple of hours we heated up the oven to 425 and popped them in at their current diminutive size. Oh well.

They came out like little bread knots. No flaky layers, no puffiness. Just a solid, dense chunk of bread. They were good if you were expecting bread knots.

Later on I read some other recipes for croissants, all of which called for perhaps a teaspoon or tablespoon of sugar. I realized that the sugar was the "food" for the yeast. Poor Charlotte, we starved her!

I have a new appreciation every time I casually pick up a croissant from a bakery. I'm going to try a different recipe and see if I can succeed at this. It was too much fun not to do it again.

No More Ugly Cake

Previously, I've chronicled the adventure of making ugly cake as my Christmas tradition. Well, it's not supposed to be ugly cake, it's supposed to be a sour cream coffee cake made with a brown sugar/butter/walnut filling that comes out of a bundt pan.

My mother managed to make said coffee cake for decades. Year after year, she would make several of these beauts, to be enjoyed as a family on Christmas morning while opening presents or to be given to friends and family as a Christmas present.

As for me, year after year I attempted to copy her same recipe, but with very different results, as you can see:

The 2008 ugly cake.



The 2009 ugly cake.

I can never manage to get the cake out of the bundt pan in one piece. Each year led to an interrogation from my mom: Did I use Crisco and not butter? Had I floured the pan? Did I make sure that the sides of the coffee cake pulled away from the sides before trying to extract it from the pan? It seemed that this was a delicate process that I would never master.

And then, there is this year's attempt:

Beautiful, isn't it? Fully intact with no filling sticking out of the top or the edge, making the cake stick inside the pan.

The girls were amazed. They couldn't believe their eyes. And they were slightly disappointed. After all, unless the cake crumbles out of the pan, there are no crumbs or little pinches of filling to eat. Guess they will just have to wait until Christmas morning to see if it tastes as good as it looks.

So much to be thankful for

This was an unusual Thanksgiving Day for us, in that for the first time in many years Wayne's parents did not travel to our house for Thanksgiving dinner. Between the forecast for bad weather and, let's face it, the bad airbed, they opted to stay home. We'll be seeing them tomorrow anyway, for our annual trek to their home for the big family get together on Saturday.

But for the first time since becoming a family of four, we had Thanksgiving at our home. Just us, no one else.

Lindsey and I took in a movie in the morning -- Tangled. It was a 9:45 a.m. showing, and it was the first movie that she stayed in the whole time and did not leave the theatre during scary parts. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, even having popcorn and Sprite at that hour in the morning.

Then I came home and baked up a couple of pies: pumpkin and apple. I follow my mom's dutch apple pie recipe, and it's a good one. I had bought apples two or three times over the past month with the intention of making this pie, only to have the apples get eaten throughout the week. At least my kids are healthy eaters!

I made a mostly full Thanksgiving spread, minus the dishes that my family for a whole doesn't eat (which meant none of my favorite sweet potatoes). We sat around the table and said what we were thankful for:

Family
Friends
A house
A job
Food
Clean water
Good health
Children
Spouses
School and the education that goes along with it
entertainment (specifically the movie Tangled - guess who said this one)

And throughout the evening I thought of all the people in my life who I am thankful for, friends old and new, co-workers (also old and new), and family. I thought of the family that I sponsor through Children International in the Phillipines, and how they were able to buy a mattress for many family members to sleep on with some of the money I sent their way -- yet some of the family members still sleep on the floor. I wondered how many days they could feed their family of 7 on the food we consumed in a single meal.

While these thoughts went through my head, I counted my blessings some more and gave my kids extra big hugs. I am very thankful indeed.

Dueling Bakers

A few weekends ago I was in the middle of making a batch of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies when I discovered that someone had been helping themselves to my chocolate chips, leaving me with a mostly empty bag in my pantry.

Since I was in the middle of the batch and had no intention of making cookies without chocolate in them, I began calling around to my neighbors to see if anyone had a bag I could use.

My first call was my next-door neighbor, even though I suspect she wouldn't have any on hand. She is all of 100 lbs even though she's 5 ft 7, she can't possibly always stock her pantry with chocolate like I do. I ended up leaving her a message and eventually secured a bag from a different neighbor.

"Why'd you call her?" my husband asked. "She doesn't bake." Well, we can always hope...

A few hours later I saw her in the backyard, and she informed me that she didn't have any to spare, at which point I shared with her my husband's sentiments that she probably wouldn't. "Hey now!" she said, "I do TOO bake!"

A week later she proved it.

She left on our doorstep the following package.

Note the use of pre-made, pre-cut sugar cookies. Awesome.

Much to my husband's surprise, a stash of obviously homemade cookies (two kinds, mind you!) were under the pre-made ones, and they were delicious.



This is Lindsey's hand, pretending to grab a handful of cookies.

 So we've been proven wrong. I think next we'll accuse her of never cooking and see if we can get a dinner out of the deal.

It's all in the ingredients

I've had lots of compliments over the years about my baked goods, with many people attempting my same recipes and getting different results. Not sure what the difference is, but I can tell you one secret: ingredients.

For example:

I made some brownies tonight to bring some in to work tomorrow as it's the Friday before Valentine's Day. The recipe calls for 2/3 C of baking cocoa. So I used 1/3 C of your regular old, run-of-the-mill Hershey's baking cocoa, and 1/3 C of a gourmet dark baking cocoa that a former co-worker of mine gave special from his stash. The stuff is expensive and custom ordered from the internet only, but is worth every cent.

Just look at the difference in color:

He warned me against doing a full substitute to the dark cocoa, because it's so rich it would overpower the entire recipe, thus my solution of half and half.

We'll see if my co-workers agree that my substitution worked. Lucky co-workers...

Cut out Cookies...Reprise

We awoke to -2 air temps today -- there goes plans for sledding. So cookies it was, and Lindsey wanted to make cut out cookies. We did this during Marissa's nap once again, to keep the squabbling to a minimum.

We made up the dough, rolled it out and the cookies turned out much better than our first attempt. We let them cool, and took turns frosting them while Lindsey sprinkled sprinkles on all of them. We set them on the little white table in the kitchen, to give us room to decorate the rest on the countertop. After a while we took a few downstairs to Wayne and settled in to watch the Vikings game.

After a couple of minutes I heard a sound like something hitting the floor. Nothing breakable, mind you, just a little "thump." I peaked up the stairs to see, no, no Marissa feet yet, she must still be sleeping.

After a couple more minutes I heard another little "thump," and this time when I looked up the stairs I saw Dax at the top of the stairs, sniffing around. Huh, well, whatever he's up to, we'll go back to our game.

Then I heard another "thump." Okay, VERY suspicious...

I go upstairs to find that there are only SEVEN sugar cookies left on the little white table. Dax had been getting his front feet onto the paper towel that was on the table, pulled it over to the edge until a cookie dropped off and then eating the cookie. Once gone, the task was repeated until he gained another cookie.

We're not sure how many were on the paper towel to begin with -- so he either got a hold of 3 or 5 cookies. We found evidence of pink frosting on the kitchen rug, so we know where the crime of eating them occurred.

Dax sat by us very lethargic the rest of the afternoon. I think he was in a sugar low.

Coffee Cake Envy

I spoke to my sister last night, she informed me that she attempted mom's coffee cake recipe. While the filling came out of the bottom a little, it's not nearly as tragic as when it comes out the top as mine did. Her coffee cake remained intact when she flipped it and was quite a sight to see in all it's beauty. So much so, in fact, that she had to take a picture of it to show me.

The woman can cook and bake, she just chooses not to.

Bitch.

And I mean that in the most loving way!

Coffee Cake Ending

It is 5 o'clock on Christmas Day, and the coffee cake has been diminished to a sliver of its former self.

So despite its appearance, it was deemed delicious by all.

Especially the 5-year-old.

Coffee Cake: The Results

Here's the start...cake all ready to go in the oven.






Now it's out and cooling...Okay, we flipped it, now waiting a bit before we start working on it. (You can tell that we're waiting by the annoyed look on Lindsey's face. Waiting is not her strong suit.)




Drum roll please....


Cursed!! Foiled again!

Ugly Cake

In my adulthood I have attempted to carry forward one particular tradition of my mom's from my childhood: coffee cake on Christmas morning.

My mom would spend weeekends and days before Christmas cooking and baking and freezing the outcome, so that come Christmas she could have a relatively stress-free Christmas. The Christmas Eve lasagna was pre-made and frozen, then taken out the morning of Christmas Eve to defrost. It was put in the oven when we left for Christmas Eve service, and when we returned the house would smell of basil and garlic and it could come out with the edges a little crusty and the sauce bubbling up.

And the coffee cake was also pre-made, frozen, and then Christmas Eve was also defrosted. On Christmas morning it was put in the oven (set on "warm") and warmed through, to be enjoyed with a coffee and a gift.

Her coffee cake was made in a bundt pan, with the walnut/brown sugar "topping" actually becoming a filling through the center of the cake. She would make several of them, then wrap some of them up in tinfoil with ribbons and give to friends as gifts before Christmas. They were pretty to behold and even more delicious to taste.

And then there's my attempt.

For many years, I successfully made said coffee cake, with the recipe given to me by my mother. My sister-in-law Laurie can attest to the successful outcome of those baking attempts, with the cake coming out beautiful and tasty at the same time.

But for the last few years I have been plagued with bundt-pan-itis: the cake sticks in the pan to the point that only half of it comes out and the other half stays in the pan. When the other half finally lets loose, it breaks apart and crumbles into a pile of pieces of deliciousness.

Yummy? Yes. Pretty? No.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to dust off the bundt pan from my pathetic attempt last year and try to make just a regular yellow cake in it (the box of cake mix says you can). Perhaps if I were successful in this, I would attempt the coffee cake in a bundt pan. If not, it will be relegated to a 9x12 boring pan.

So during Marissa's nap time one weekend afternoon, Lindsey and I attempted to make just a plain old yellow cake in the bundt pan. We watched it through the oven window as it rose and began smelling yummy. It was done all the way through and the edges were pulling away from the sides: perfect.

I took it out, let it cool for 10mins, then turned it upside down. This is the point at which my mom says her bundt cakes just "fall" out of the pan onto the cooling rack.

No falling going on here. Nothing. No movement whatsoever.

I begin to bang a knife on the bottom of the pan, diminutive dents added to the dents from my previous attempts at a bundt cake.

Twenty minutes later, I finally succeeding in freeing the cake from its pan. Half, that is. The other half still stuck in the pan.

Lindsey immediately named the cake "ugly cake." Because it's ugly all right, crumbles and bits all over, but it tastes delicious.

Despite this attempt, I am today going to attempt once more to make coffee cake in the bundt pan. At least this year I'll have a few days before Christmas to re-do my efforts if need be.

Check back later for an update on how this turns out!