Eclairs

Oh, what to do with leftover pastry cream from gourmet class?  Make eclairs of course.  It's been awhile since I've made pâte à choux dough at home, using TSOB.  I've been making it at school, using a slightly different recipe and cooking method.  These ones turned out a little bit soggier than the ones at school, because the TSOB way is to put a pan of hot water in the oven with the dough.  I prefer a crunchy bite instead, so in the future I'll just bake it without the pot of water.

Hazelnut Brown Butter Brownies

I had a big craving for brownies the other day and knew I'd saved a brownie recipe from Food and Wine magazine to make "someday."  The picture in the magazine is incredible, mine not so much.  They are gluten-free; flour is replaced with ground-up hazelnuts.  They were wonderfully rich and gooey and perfect with vanilla ice cream!

Chocolate Financier Cake

I've finally moved on to another chapter in TSOB, the financier cakes!  I don't remember much about how this tasted (other than good of course) because I did it awhile ago.  The book says it's moister than other cakes because only egg whites are used (no foaming the egg whites) and melted butter is added (instead of creaming butter and sugar.)  I'll have to make a gingerbread one for Christmas or a carrot cake for my husband just because to remind me of how good it is!

Torta Sabbiosa

Torta sabbiosa means "sand cake" in Italian.  It's quite dry, like sand, but it's light and airy like angel food cake and melts in the mouth.  It's made with potato flour and I think that's what makes it dry.  The last time I made an Italian cake, I used almond meal and it was also dry.  Wonder if there's something to that?

Since I had two layers, I had to come up with a filling, and what's better than Nutella?  It still needed something for the dryness; in TSOB, Ms. Yard suggests serving it with sweetened mascarpone.  I decided to buy coffee gelato.  It was good, but the gelato almost overpowered the cake.  Next time, I think I'll try the suggestion of the queen of Italian-American cooking, Lidia Bastianich, and douse the cake with amaretto or limoncello and a topping of cream and/or fruit and berries! 

Lemon Cake

This cake is the second thing I've made for friends and gotten paid for!  This person wanted cake with a lemon curd filling and lemon italian meringue buttercream frosting.  I've done the lemon curd before, but have never made the italian meringue frosting.  And, like all things lately, I had to take a second shot at the frosting.  Meringue is very temperamental, and when I added the butter the first time around, it broke the perfect peaks I had going on the meringue.  I'm told that if I would have kept the mixer going, it would have come back together, but I wanted to start over and get it right the first time.

Vanilla Pound Cake

I have finally stopped procrastinating and moved on to the next chapter in TSOB; pound cakes and genoise cakes.  I had to repeat the basic pound cake recipe because I messed up the first time.  My first cake was  dense and dry.  My mistakes were starting with cold butter and weighing out 8 oz of cake flour versus weighing out how much a cup of flour weighs (7 oz).  Pound cake has no baking soda or baking powder, so the rise comes from whipping air into the butter while creaming it with the sugar.  That works better with softer butter.  The difference between the two cakes was incredible.  See how moist the good cake turned out?

I topped it with some farmer's market strawberries that were cooked in orange juice and a bit of sugar and some (kind of old) homemade whipped cream.  So good!  Now to try genoise cakes.

Blueberry Cobbler

One of my all-time favorite summer desserts is blueberry cobbler.  I use a tried and true recipe from Real Simple magazine.  I made this for our July 4th barbecue, since it's so pretty and patriotic with all that blue.  I bought greek yogurt ice cream for the first time to go with it, and it was pretty yummy.