Monday, December 14, 2009

Daring Cooks December salmon en croute


This month I did my first Daring Cooks challenge! Salmon en croute. We had the option to do other things in pastry if we wanted but I wanted to do something I have never done before and I had never ever cooked fish before.
I mean seriously this is the first piece of fish I have ever even touched in its raw form (other than sushi and I just pop that in my mouth ASAP).



So fish is gross. Really, really, really gross. Salmon is pretty much the only kind of fish I can even imagine eating cooked. But skinning it and handling it raw was one of the nastiest things i have done. I have a pretty crappy collection of knives so I was super thankful that the skin came off pretty easy.




I made the shortcust pastry the day be fore using the following measurements
Ingredients:
450 gr (15.8 ounces or 3.2 cups ) of plain all purpose flour
200 gr ( 7 ounce) cold butter
pinch of salt

Sift the flour into a large bowl, add the butter and rub in with your fingertips until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs. If you have a food processor you can use that as shown in the above video. Stir in the salt, then add 2-3 tbsp of water and mix to a firm dough. Knead the dough briefly and gently on a floured surface. Wrap in cling film and chill while preparing the filling. For best results make sure the butter is very cold. But it was way too floury and I ended up adding like 6 or 7 tablespoons of water and it made a huge amount of pastry.But none of that mattered because when I went to take it out of the fridge the next day I found out that my fridge is dying and is freezing everything so there it is a frozen solid rock of pastry. The pastry was pretty easy to make so I just made another one real quick and I cut the recipe in half (and still had to add more than 3T of water and had more than enough pastry).

I just had super bad luck with the pastry. This was a brand new measuring cut and it snapped right in half when all I was doing was scooping flour. The wine bottle came out after this and everything at least felt like it went a little smoother :)







For the filing I used cream cheese, lemon juice and dill. I love dill! and I had never used it fresh before, it is definitely going to become a staple in my house from now on






Here it is all spread out and ready to bake












I cut fish shaped steam vents.










I had so much leftover pastry that I decided at the last minute to make a mini veggie version with some mushrooms I had hat I needed to use.







Here it all done! It was super delicious.



Monday, November 30, 2009

daring bakers november challenge cannoli



This November's challenged was cannoli. I had never even eaten them before so I was a little nervous. Plus I am not really a huge fan of frying things I feel like I'm wasting oil, and my apartment smelled for days.









Here is the dough right before I rolled it out. It may have been too dry. I'm not sure because I have never made cannoli before.









I thought the dough was really hard to role out. I mean I don't have a rolling pin or anything so I used a cup, but it sprung back like crazy an I don't think a rolling pin would have fixed that.











I used a big mug as a guide to cut the circles out. Since I didn't have any forms I think I cut them too big.










I totally forgot that I was making cannoli when I was at the store so I did not even look for forms or anything that I could use as forms. So I looked all through my kitchen for something I could not only wrap the dough around but that would not melt in the hot oil and I came up with butter knives!








Camera reflection in the hot hot oil












The first one















Before I took them off the knives.











I got blisters! I was so excited to see that my cannoli blistered I was not sure that they would since everything seemed too thick.











All the shells I made.















I filled them with a cinnamon ricotta filling. It was slightly difficult to pipe the filling in because the shells were pretty narrow from using butter knives as forms.








And here I am after consuming the left over wine that went into the shells :)




Overall it was a pretty good experience. I would like to try cannoli prepared by someone else so I can know if I did it right or not. The shells were thicker than I expected, though I think that comes from me cutting them too large for the "forms". I was not a huge fan of them the first night (though my roommate was) but the next day I thought they were pretty good.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

I'm a Daring Baker! October challenge French Macaroons



So I have only ever failed at baking somehting I set my mind to twice. The first time I had to have been about 13 or 14 and we were pretty poor at that time but my father wanted a cake. So I attempted to make a white cake from scratch with what we had available, and it turned out like a sponge. A dense cinnamon flavored sponge. To this day I say that I can't make a cake from scratch, but the truth is I've never tried after my first disastrous attempt.
So now I'm a daring Baker, and hopefully it will get my ass in line and get me trying some things I have never done before and also get me to try things I fail at over again.

The first challenge I have participated in was making French macaroons. And boy did I fail the first time I made them. I don't even have pictures of that trial run but it was a runny flat mess let me tell you. The second time I tried I took more time with everything.

Here are the first batch piped out sitting before I put them in at 200 degrees












To the left is what they look like when they
came out of the 200 degree oven. I baked them
for longer than what the recipe called for and
I let them sit for longer while the oven heated to 375 degrees because I wanted some feet!







FEET!!!!!!!!










I was so freaking happy when I pulled
these out of the oven










Look at those bottoms!













I made frosting from powdered sugar, butter and raspberry tea and lemon juice. The raspberry tea turned the frosting a super pretty pale pink. It was super sweet but really delicious.


























So they did not come out as tall and as neat as I would have liked but I got feet and hard shells with a chewy inside! They were super sweet but my roommate, best friend and my mom all liked them and that is what really matters!
I'm super excited for next month.
:)