Best Cobbler Ever

So I was only going to use this space to write about my Daring Bakers challenges, but I had to make an exception. I find that there are few recipes involving fruit that manage to make the fruit taste even better than it did fresh, but this is one of them. This cobbler is one of the best things I've ever tasted. Seriously. I'm going to go to the fridge and take another bite right now.

From the NYT magazine, June 18 1995, discovered and perfected by my mom.

Filling:
4 1/2 cups fresh blueberries
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbsp all purpose flour

Dough:
1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 tsp kosher salt (but regular is okay too)
1 1/2 tbsp sugar
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
6 tbsp cold, unsalted butter, cut into 1/2 inch peices
3/4 cup heavy cream

Preheat oven to 375. Mix filling. Mix dry ingredients of dough in a food processor, then cut in butter until a coarse meal. Add cream and barely mix with a fork. Transfer filling to baking 1 1/2 qt. baking dish. Gently press dough into 6 patties, each 2 inches in diameter and 1/2 inch thick. (the more gentle you are the flakier the biscuits will be!) Add patties on top of berries, okay if touching. Bake until filling is bubbling and dough is light brown, about 35-40 min. Cool briefly and serve hot with ice cream.



By the way, can you believe how not-blue the inside of a blueberry is??

Hazelnut One-Time Wonder

July 2008 Daring Baker’s Challenge: Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream

(Recipe from Great Cakes by Carol Walter)

This month’s recipe is not one I will be making again. The challenge contained a whooping 7 sub-recipes. It required a pan I didn’t own, and required 8 hours I didn’t have. The introduction of the recipe described a decadent hazelnut cake with buttercream topped with ganache. I don’t particularly like hazelnuts. But despite all of this, I thought I would give it a try, in an attempt to be open minded and expand my baking repertoire. My mom was visiting for the weekend, and she agreed to help me.

Let’s recall trying to melt the sugar for the praline paste. Thirty minutes of frustrating pan
shifting and gas adjusting just to create a partly burned, deathly hot, carmel. Then add the
hazelnuts and “stir with a wooden spoon and separate the clusters.” See pic. In my mom’s words: “Well that’s a cluster fuck if I’ve ever seen one.” And then I burned myself on the caramel.

The cake itself took 20 minutes longer to cook than the recipe recommended. While cooling, the cake sunk into the cooling rack giving it a ¼ inch deep grid across the top. One sub-recipe after another became more painful, in the heat of my small, un-air-conditioned kitchen. Seven hours into it, there was no way I was going to try to make buttercream leaves on top. Even my attempt at a decorative circle failed. I finally opted for a more natural, crushed hazelnut garnish.

While transferring the cake from the cardboard round to a dish, most of the bottom layer of cake stuck to the spatula. Then, on the way to the concert picnic where I had promised 10 hungry students there would be “filbert gateau with praline buttercream,” the buttercream and ganache melted enough for the layers to slide off one another. Great. This is not a summer recipe.

Now I have to say that I did save half of the cake at home and was able to sample a still assembled, cold version of the cake late that night. And I can’t say I thought it was very good. The buttercream to cake ratio was way too high – I’ve never been a fan of creams or frostings, but I really think this is not a subjective comment. Each bite was too rich, and texturally unsatisfying. There was not enough sponge or crunch (even with the extra shopped hazelnuts on top) to balance the buttery mush of the buttercream.

This recipe was far too time intensive for the quality of the product. I don’t have very much extra time in my schedule – who does?! – and definitely won’t be making it, or anything like it, again.

Adventures with Laminated Dough

June 2008 Daring Baker Challenge: Danish Dough

(Recipe from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking)

I am what I would call a casual baker -- I bake once or twice a month and usually stick to simple recipes. I am not, however, a casual eater. I have an insatiable sweet tooth, and have been sampling pastries my entire life. A good bite of say, chocolate soufflé, or a cold piece of leftover pie for breakfast, are the types of things I dream about. My interest in tasting has inspired me to experiment with more serious baking from time to time, including a 4 month stint as an assistant baker at an adorable family-owned bakery just outside San Diego. But professional baking is not for me; I find the hours intolerable and the work physically taxing while mentally unstimulating. So I have chosen to pursue other topics for my career, and the time I spend baking now is minimal. I have recently joined the Daring Bakers - an online baking club - to challenge myself to more difficult recipes, even if only once a month. This was my first challenge.

I was really looking forward to this recipe because I absolutely love pastry, and particularly fruit-filled pastry. I had a few road-bumps early on in the recipe -- not able to obtain a vanilla bean and not having a proper mortar and pestle to grind my cardamom pods -- but both were solved easily enough. I skipped the vanilla and ground the cardamom pods as best I could with a regular household hammer. This worked reasonably well, but I have to admit my dough ended up faintly dotted with coarse cardamom shrapnel.

Once the dough was made, I was out of the woods. I had no trouble adding the butter block, folding, chilling, rolling, etc. It was time consuming (watching Inside Man with Denzel Washington helped with the wait periods) and slightly messy (a hot day in Los Angeles meant very mushy butter occasionally squirting out as I rolled) but not the end of the world. I found that flipping the dough every few rolls ensured that the bottom layers were not left behind – otherwise the top stretched further than the bottom. I let the completed dough chill overnight.

I chose 2 fillings for my braids. One is my favorite pie filling – a simple mixture of peeled peaches, blueberries, cinnamon, sugar, and a bit of flour, none of which are measured and each of which I could eat on its own. The other I found in one of the great pastry cookbooks of all time: Bernard Clayton’s The Complete Book of Pastry. I took the recipe for the filling for his almond tarts, and made it as listed. The recipe called for grated lemon rind, which I thought would go nicely with the orange zest in the dough. I spooned these into to center of my unfolded braids, and then crossed the arms of the dough over the fillings. I brushed with egg wash at the last minute and popped them in the oven.

My first bite of dough hot out of the oven was one of the best bites in my history. AMAZING. I was slightly less pleased 2 hours later when the braids had cooled a bit, but it was still delicious. My test tasters (a group of 7 family friends, plus my boyfriend) raved. It was a success!