Crostada

This month's challenge over at Daring Baker's was an Italian crostada tart. I chose to try making mine with pastry cream so I could learn how to make both in one fell swoop.

Ingreeds for crust

I've shyed away from making pies, tarts and the like because I have a lot of trouble working with yeast doughs. This pastry dough, with its short ingredient list (as you can see from above), was much easier to work with for its smooth texture.


If anyone has noticed my inability to attempt last month's DB challenge, rest assured that it was due to drastic kitchen renovations and not a fear of tackling doughnuts. They're certainly on my list of things to over the upcoming break! It was hard living without a kitchen for over a month, but one of the many rewards for my patience are the gorgeous new counter tops, which are an excellent surface on which to mix dry and wet ingredients :)

Ingreeds for filling

I've made several fruit-filled pies before so I decided to make the whole experience a completely new one by filling my crostada with a chocolate pastry cream.


It's at times like this I wish I had a pie shield. Regardless, it was pretty good, if so extremely rich that not even my brothers could go back for seconds. If I made it again it would be for the pleasure of working with such a smooth, easy dough, with a different filling.


Thanks for reading, and dftba! :)

September Sugar Cookies

Hurray for my second Daring Bakers challenge!!, oh noes for failing at making them, hahahau. This month's challenge was to make cookies which show what September means to me. Being a Potterhead, the first thing I thought of was the annual Hogwarts Express journey on September 1st.

Ingreeds for cookie doug
I am very happy to announce that renovations for a brand new kitchen and soliarium are now underway! Unfortunatly, I had to kitchen for most of this month and won't have one in time for next's.

Renovations started September 2nd, so I made this dough in my old kitchen literally the day before it was ripped apart. I rolled and froze it for a few weeks until I got the chance to use my friend's oven. I would not recommend freezing this dough, it resulting in very hard cookies, not at all ideal.

Ingreeds for royal/glacee icing

I had to work the next day so I didn't end up decorating the cookies until late the next night.



Being a Ravenclaw (hence the blog title), I incorporated some of my house colours into the cookie decor.

Yay for Ravenclaw colours, nay for non-canon patch and wax seal.

All in all, a fun project but my lack of kitchen made the cookies themselves yucky. Regardless, thanks for reading, and dftba!

Baked Alaska

I was ever so excited to be accepted into the Daring Bakers community at the end of last month. So excited, in fact, that I turned my very first Daring Challenge into a semi-communal event :)

Alex - guest photographer for this post and fellow Ravenclaw extraordinaire

August's challenge was the option of making either Baked Alaska or petits fours using a brown butter pound cake and homemade icing. My original plan was to make both, however time constraints (working more than forty hours a week!) prevented me from finishing them, so they have been sitting lonely in my freezer for weeks now.

Action shot!

Making the ice cream was easy, especially since I happened to purchase an ice cream machine at the beginning of the summer. Browning the butter seemed daunting but turned out to be easy and smelled delicious. The cake was merely okay, probably not a make again.


My grandpa, who was a pro cook on a convoy ship in WWII, happened to come by at the very moment I was about to make the meringue. Of course I recruited him to help :)

He showed me some tricks of the trade, including chilling the eggs whites, bowl and beaters in the freezer for a few minutes. I had read before that egg whites beat better when at room temperature, but this method seemed to work really well. The meringue was delicious, but unfortunately I ruined the entire dessert by failing to cover all the ice cream, allowing it to melt in the oven!


I'm calling this one a re-do! But this is what learning is all about. Thanks for reading, and dftba!

Sesame Noodles

I'm much more of a baker then a cook, but when I saw these noodles I knew what I was having as a late night snack that night. Such simplicity for such tasty, healthy results.

Ingreeds

I combined the above in a measuring cup with some sugar and hot water, and poured it right over my pasta. I was supposed to use sesame oil as well but I did not have any on hand.

Omg yum.


Garnish with some sesame seeds, both toasted and regular, and it's good to go! I shared with my brother and he thought they were good, too.

Thanks for reading, have a good one, and dftba!

French Macarons

It feels as if I have been admiring French macarons, with all their mini-cookie-sandwhich-adorableness, across the internet for years. It's as if succeeding at this particular dessert is a pre-requisite for any decent food blog. So, when I found almond flour while shopping with my mother at a bulk food store, I knew I had to try making them.

Rainy mornings all week prevented me from putting that almond flour to good use- you can't beat egg whites when it's humid! I was finally able to make them last night after work, but man, that wait was worth it.

I've had the impression that these suckers were very hard to make. Sure, they were rather fussy, with many bowls and steps required, but by following this recipe to the T I was able to procure wholly satisfying results :)

Ingreeds

Other than the almond flour, nothing really out of the ordinary. I had some cherry candy flavouring leftover from when I pulled taffy awhile ago, but it wasn't necessary.

I separated my eggs while they were still cool, then left the whites become room temperature while I prepared everything else. This is because colder eggs separate more neatly, but warm egg whites yield more volume.

Ouu, voluminous.

I made a simple syrup and added it to the beaten whites. Such a lovely gloss! After folding in the dry ingredients, I separated the batter in half to make some pink-tinted cherry macarons, and some golden-tinted vanilla macarons.

Fresh from the oven, arranged by size (because I fail at uniformity haha). Don't they have the cutest little feet? Not perfect, but pretty darn good for a first try, I'd say.

Some assembly required

Check the production line on these cuties. I filled them with a reduced raspberry puree (jam turned out to be too "slippery") and a basic white chocolate ganache.

I'd say that this first attempt was quite the success, especially since my coworkers thought they were yummy too :)

Thanks for reading, have a good one, and dftba!

The Beginning

This blog used to be where I posted my writing, but I've decided to re-purpose it for my baking and cooking seeing as how I have been using Facebook as a food picture platform for far too long.

I hope to use this space to document my advances in the art of baking as I take on increasingly difficult dishes!

Let's see how that goes. I think it'll be an adventure :)