Super Lemon Victoria Sponge

I breaking this into 4 parts:

• Self-rising flour
• Victoria sponge
• Drizzle
• Swiss merengue buttercream

Self Rising Flour

A lot of British recipes call for self-rising flour.  When they do, I use this recipe from King Arthur:
http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/homemade-self-rising-flour-recipe

Victoria Sponge

I had not realized until embarking on this endeavor, but pound cake, quatre quarts, and victoria sponge are all nearly identical cakes.  They are defined as having equal parts sugar, flour, butter, and eggs.

Ingredients

• 8 ounces flour
• 8 ounces sugar
• 4 large eggs (2oz each)
• 8 ounces unsalted Kerrigold butter
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• Zest of one lemon

Steps

1. Warm the butter and eggs to room temperature.  Line the bottom of two 8inch cake pans with parchment paper and grease the sides. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Cream the sugar and butter in a stand mixer until it is fluffy and pale yellow (~5min)
3. While the butter is creaming, whisk together the dry ingredients, including zest.
4. Add the eggs one at a time to the creamed butter, and continue to mix until it has the consistency of cream cheese
5. Add the dry ingredients and slowly mix for a full minute to develop some gluten (otherwise cake will fall).
6. Divide batter into the two pans, and bake for 25min.
7. Let cool for 5min, run a spatula along the edged of pan, and upend onto wire rack covered in parchment paper for further cooling.

Lemon Drizzle

While the cake is cooling:

• Juice two lemons, add 85g sugar, and heat in pan on medium until the sugar dissolves (do not boil).
• Use toothpick to poke holes in each cake, then pour 1/2 of syrup over each, using pastry brush to spread evenly.

Swiss Merengue Buttercream

I just stole the recipe for this from a Martha Suart page and wasn't too happy with it, so for now I am going to say to pick a recipe. Use an amount with 2 egg whites, and at the end mix in the zest of your second lemon.

Cover one sponge in buttercream, then sandwhich the other on top.
Like always, I forgot to take a picture until we'd eaten almost all of it.

Pecan Pralines

Combined 2 recipes for this and am pretty happy, but I'll update as I fiddle.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 tbspn molasses or corn syrup or cane syrup (I used cane syrup)
• 6-8tbspn (˜115g) salted butter
• 1.5 cups pralines, crushed

1. Mix the milk and sugars and syrup and very slowly bring them to a boil, stirring constantly.
2. Take them to the soft ball candy stage / 238F
3. Add the butter and stir while it bubbles like crazy.
4. Add the pecans.
5. Bring back to 238 / soft ball
6. Immediately spoon out onto parchment paper (˜2tbspn each) and let cool completely

Easy Peasy

Notes:

If you go to fast (like I did) and the milk proteins curdle out (like mine did) you can fix them by hitting the mix with a immersion blender once it starts to thicken.  Similarly if the caramel seperates after adding the butter you can do the same.  This is why I add the pecans last.

As soon as you remove the pot from the stove, start spooning out pralines.  I let it cool some, concerned about the volcanic heat, and by 1/2 way through spooning them out, my praline mix was hardening in the pot.

The mulk curdling otu annoyed me, and makes me thing that next time I might make my caramel with just water and then add cream with the butter.  But I have to think on this.

These were a big hit at T's work and tasted as good as the ones I buy in New Orleans, like molassesy, nutty fudge.

Lemon sugar cookies

Continuing with using up meyer lemons.
This is a basic change of a sugar cookie recipe for important lemony purposes.

Ingredients:

• 1.5 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• A little less than 0.5 tspn baking powder
• 2 tblspn meyer lemon zest (2 lemons)
• 0.5 cups sugar
• 0.5 cup / 125g salted butter
• 1 egg
• 0.25 cups lemon juice

1. Mix the flour, baking powder, and lemon zest together
2. Cream the butter and sugar
3. Add the egg and lemon juice to the butter and sugar and mix well
4. Add the flour mixture in and mix until just come together (do not over mix)
5. Chill at least 2 hours or overnight

You can either try rolling the dough out like pie dough to cut out shape, or just scoop out 1in balls (I did ther latter).

Bake at 375F for 10minutes then let cool before icing.  

I iced with left over lemon syrup from making candied lemon peel, but a classic icing of lemon juice mixed with powdered sugar would also work well.

Make ~20 cookies.

These were popular, but I felt like they had a little too much baking powder flavor.  I might try and replace the baking powder with a small ammount of baking soda next time because the lemon juice will activate it.  Also I could have probably baked them longer to get more of a crunchy cookie, instead of a soft more doughy cookie.

Candied Orange Peel

I think candying your own citrus peel is very worthwhile if you plan on making a recipe that uses it, because store bought peel is often stale and bitter, in part because they bulk it out with the albedo, the white fleshy part.

The recipe is pretty basic, but I just made some, and there are a few extra steps I take and a step I leave out, so it's worth noting my spin for future use.

Ingredients:

• 3 oranges
• 1 cup sugar

First you want to peel the oranges.  I discovered that a spiralizer I got for Christmas will make a very nice thin single rope of peel, so I used that.  But if you don't own one, just take a knife or potato peeler and carve strips off the oranges.  The key here is that they are thin and contain very little of the white.

Next you want to simmer them in a good ammount of water for 30minutes.

Then dump out and replace the water and simmer for another 30 minutes.

Here are my strips of peel simmering to remove bitterness

Next you are going to juice the oranges, then add water until you have 1 cup of juice+water.

Mix this with 1 cup sugar and bring to a boil

Add the drained peel and simmer over very low heat until the sugar solution has been condensed/absorbed (˜1hr), swirling or stirring every 10 minutes.

What the peel and syrup look like when the cooking is done.

Notice how condensed it is

Remove from the heat, let the pot cool, and place everythign in the fridge overnight.

Reheat the pot until the sugar solution is thin, and pull the peel out (I use chop sticks, but you can also poor it over a seive.

The peel should be left to cool on baking parchment.  At this point it can optionally be rolled in sugar.

The solution can be saved and used as a potently orange flavored simple syrup.

Finished, delicious and ready to decorate something.

To me, candied orange peel always looks like jewels

Kouign Amann

Ever since my honeymoon in Brittany, this has been a dessert I've wanted ot master.  I've cooked in 3-4 times since then with different techniques and different recipes, but I finally have one I really like.

For those of you not in the know, this is like a croissant, but with a ton of sugar folded in that turns the whole thing into a buttery caramel mess.  

The big goal here, like with all laminated doughs is to keep thigns cold enough the butter doesn't melt.

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 220g whole wheat bread flour + 180g water

              OR

• 250g white bread flour + 150g water
• 5g /1tspn yeast
• 3g / 0.5tspn salt

Folding:

• 200g sugar
• 200g salted butter (Ideally from Brittany.  Trader Joe's sells it)

Directions:

Mix the flour, water, salt and yeast into a dough and knead until smoothe.  I tend to use whole wheat for everything and like the taste, but white flour is the more traditional and easier to work with ingredient.

Let the dough rise an hour until doubled in size.

Meanwhile, beat the butter into a flat square in between two sheets of parchment paper and chill in the refrigerator.

Initial Turning:

1. Roll the dough out into a rectangle 2x the size of your butter square.
2. Place the butter on one half and cover in 1/5 / 40g of the sugar, then fold over the dough and seal the edges, making a dough packet to hold the butter and sugar.

4 turnings:

1. Fold the quare of dough in 1/3rds, sprinkling 40g of sugar between the folds (1/2 in 1st fold and 1/2 in second)
2. Chill for 30min in refrigerator.
3. Roll back into a recantgle.

Repeat the fold 3 more times, ending with rolling out into a square the size of your cake pan.

In the photo below, my cake pan is too large. Next time I will use one 2/3 the size, and shape the quare into a round with corners either tucked under (traditional breton way) or pointing up (more common in America).

It is important here to use a light colored/ aluminum pan.  A lot fo caramel is generated, and in my experiences, black cake pans burn it. 

Notice also how the layers are so think you can see butter through the top one, but the butter is still a solid mass.

Baking:

If you want, you can leave the kouign amann overnight covered in the fridge or bake right away.

Place the cake pan on a parchment lined baking tray for drips and bake in a 425F oven for 25min.

Sooo gooey.

Savory Gruyere Quiche

This is a classic cheese quiche that I made for a work brunch.  It is . . . decadent and kind of subtle, so maube not everyone's cup of tea.

Makes 1 9-inch quiche

The Crust:

I used a pretty basic butter crust recipe as follows.

0.5lb / 2 sticks salted butter

300g / 2.5 cups whole wheat pstry flour

˜125ml / 0.5cup water

(crumb together butter and flour then add ice cold water until just firm, rest in fridge for 1hr and roll out)

I then put the crust in the freezer for 20minutes whiel I preheated an oven to 425.  Then poked hoels in the crust with a fork, covered in foil and pie weights (I used beans) and baked for 20min.

Bake for 3-5 more min without the foil or weights.  The crust will shrink some in baking, so make it a little taller.

Store in the freezer overnight.

The Filling:

Finely grate 0.5lb gruyere cheese (using the very fine, hair like pores on a basic cheese grater)  It should be light and fluffy.

Preheat oven to 300F.

Mix 500ml / 2 cups half and hlaf with 250ml / 1 cup heavy cream and bring to a simmer

(Next time I may just do half and half, as this was VERY rich)

Mix 6 eggs, then slowly pour the hot milk into the eggs while whisking

(Next time I wil add 1 tspn salt to the egg mix while whisking. You can add pepper to taste as well.)

Spread the gruyere evenly over the bottom of the crust and then pour in the egg mix.

Bake for ˜30min until edges are firm but center very jiggly

After first 15 minutes rotate pan

You can see here how it is a soft creamy custard that just holds shape.  

Pecan Praline Macarons

I had never made a macaron before and had a lot of egg whites left over from my previous baking.  Most macarons are made with almonds and filled with butter cream, but I got it in my head to make one from pecans and fill with salted caramel.

I had two goals:

Get the cool ruffled "foot"that is the sign of a perfectly made macaron

Get a delicious, crunchy then chewy texture

Spoiler Alert:  I only succeed in one of these.

I started with the recipe from here:

https://www.howtocookthat.net/public_html/easy-macaron-macaroon-recipe/

First I blended together in my kitchenaid:

4 egg whites and 70g "caster"sugar, where "caster" means I pulsed some normal sugar in my food proccessor lazily.

Made a perfect meringue fluffy meringue, so far so good.

Then I made my add in mix:

120g pecans

230g "powedered sugar"

No salt (the pecans were already salty)

What I did here was just throw normal sugar and pecans into the food proccessor, and ran into two issues:

First, while the coffee grinder makes escellent powdered sugar right off, the food proccessor doesn't work as well.  Second, pecans are SUPER oily.

I was supposed to have a light dust I could sift into my egg whites, instead I had a thick, wet, dough that I had to crumble over.

Then I mixed them:

At this point things had already run off the rails, but I did manage to get a nice incorporated marshamallowy consistency and pipe everythign out into little dallops.

Popped them into a 300F degree oven, one tray at a time.

Filling!

I stole my caramel recipe from here:

http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-salted-caramel-recipe/

It's exactly the same, except I didn't have cream so I added whole milk-- you know because they're basically identical. . . .

So then my caramel seperated.

Fun Fact:  If your caramel ever seperates, you can re-emulsify it by taking it off the heat and running a stick blender through it for 3min while it cools.  

Here's the assembled product:

And my cool Instagram montage:

Lessons Learned:  Macarons are basically 90% sugar.  I actually was turned off baking of a bit by the sheer unhealthiness of them.  Soooooo much sugar.

That said, these were pretty amazing.  Crunchy, then chewy, salty and sweet with a strong pecan flavor.  They disappeared from both T and my work pretty quick.