Biscuits Revisited

Maybe I’d been too hasty?

With all the positive feedback on these biscuits, I decided to take one out of the freezer and give it another try. The verdict: with butter and orange marmalade, not bad. Not great, mind you, but sufficiently tasty to defrost and enjoy occasionally.

Snowy Day Baking–Pecan Sour Cream Biscuits

Snow Day!

What a glorious sound. The perfect day for baking the Pecan and Sour Cream Biscuits, this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie entry.

What to say about these biscuits? I think I may be in the minority, but I just didn’t dig them. Though they went together quickly and easily (I used a glass to cut them out–no problems there), I found them too savory to be sweet and too sweet to be savory, too bland and too salty. I should have tarted them up with some sultanas or some nutmeg or some sugar on top–or all of it. I ate one (okay, one and a half, just to be sure) then bagged them up and buried them, for what may be eternity, in the freezer. Not sure what I’d serve them with. All in all just not worth the carbs. A very sad tale.

Pecan Sour Cream Biscuits

(Makes about 12 biscuits)

2 cups all-purpose flour (or 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour and 1/3 cup cake flour)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 cup (packed) light brown sugar
5 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 10 pieces
1/2 cup cold sour cream
1/4 cold whole milk
1/3 cup finely chopped pecans, preferably toasted

Getting Ready: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Get out a sharp 2-inch-diameter biscuit cutter and line a baking sheet with parchment or a silicone mat.

Whisk the flour(s), baking powder, salt, and baking soda together in a bow. Stir in the brown sugar, making certain there are no lumps. Drop in the butter and, using your fingers, toss to coat the pieces of butter with flour. Quickly, working with your fingertips (my favorite method) or a pastry blender, cut and rub the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture is pebbly. You’ll have pea-size pieces, pieces the size of oatmeal flakes and pieces the size of everything in between– and that’s just right.

Stir the sour cream and milk together and pour over the dry ingredients. Grab a fork and gently toss and turn the ingredients together until you’ve got a nice soft dough. Now reach into the bowl with your hands and give the dough a quick gentle kneading– 3 or 4 turns should be just enough to bring everything together. Toss in the pecans and knead 2 to 3 times to incorporate them.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour and turn out the dough. Dust the top of the dough very lightly with flour, pat the dough out with your hands or toll it with a pin until it is about 1/2 inch high. Don’t worry if the dough isn’t completely even– a quick, light touch is more important than accuracy.

Use the biscuit cutter to cut out as many biscuits as you can. Try to cut the biscuits close to one another so you get the most you can out of the first round. By hand or with a small spatula, transfer the biscuits to the baking sheet. Gather together the scraps, working with them as little as possible, pat out to a 1/2-inch thickness and cut as many additional biscuits as you can; transfer these to the sheet. (The biscuits ca be made to this point and frozen on the baking sheet, then wrapped airtight and kept for up to 2 months. Bake without defrosting– just add a couple more minutes to the oven time.)

Bake the biscuits for 14-18 minutes, or until they are tall, puffed and golden brown. Transfer them to a serving basket

From Dorie Greenspan, Baking: From My Home to Yours.

Beatty-and-Switch

If you’ve come here looking for the Almost Fudge Gateau, well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. We’re all out–but we’ve got a fresh Beatty’s Chocolate Cake instead!

“Who’s Beatty,” you ask? Frankly I’ve no idea, but that didn’t stop me from whipping one up on Saturday.

As you may know, last week’s Tuesdays with Dorie project was the flourless chocolate gateau named above–but I just couldn’t do it. I don’t especially like flourless chocolate cakes and I had company coming and I just wanted something less…assertive.

(Flourless chocolate cakes always seem a love it or hate it proposition to me, and I was looking for love. Or at least a cake with a more easy going personality.)

As I had been left alone to prepare for the dinner, I do what I always do in such situations. That is, I spent the morning woolgathering and wandering around with a cup of coffee unable to get down to it. And, as usual, I ended up being hours behind schedule.

A complicated dessert was by now out of the question, but a quick FoodNetwork search turned up Beatty’s Chocolate Cake and it looked like a good bet. It was an Ina Garten recipe–usually a winner–with a long list of rave reviews attached.

The cake itself was easy as a box mix (no softening butter, no creaming, no separating eggs). The most time-consuming part was sifting the dry ingredients–a step I would eliminate next time. It was dark, chocolatey, and moist. I’ll admit I almost turned the page when I saw that it was made with oil, but it was surprisingly good. Next time I need a chocolate cake I will make this one.

What did give me greater pause than the oil in the cake, however, was the frosting. It was a chocolate buttercream made with–horrors!–confectioner’s sugar. But, did I mention it was getting late…and the gushing reviews were convincing.

As it turned out it was okay–it definitely needed salt and some more vanilla. But as pleasant as it was, it never shed the slightly metallic edge this type of frosting always has. I’ll stick with real buttercream in the future.
Two bits worth noting: the recipe warns–rather dramatically, not to whip the frosting. But whip I did! And it was fine–more than fine actually. It made it fluffier and lighter–so I’m not sure what the stern command was all about.

And, if you plan to have this cake and eat it over the course of several days, make sure to take it out of the refrigerator at least two hours before you serve it. It gets very very hard, but the egg yolk in the frosting seems to warrant refrigeration.

I have no idea who or what the Beatty cake is named for, but as the photos will show, it was a darn good, old-fashioned chocolate layer cake. Think Duncan Hines ads circa 1978 and you’ll know just what I mean.

Ma Bête Noire (et Blanche)

There it was—stunning–with its elegant contrasting stripes and its formal silhouette. It was the little black dress of cakes. It also happened to be the week’s featured recipe on a recently created web-based baking group, Tuesdays with Dorie, which explained why it was popping up everywhere I looked—more on that later.

Anyway, I was hooked. Out went the banana tart (and the newly-acquired rectangular tart pan cast aside) and in waltzed the “Black and White Chocolate Cake” from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours.

Of course, it was deceiving in its simplicity … the slim layers, the symmetry, the alternating dark and light fillings. And cakes, well, they’re not my thing really. Especially a fussy one like this…what was I thinking? I guess I wasn’t thinking exactly–I was dazzled by beauty.

As these things often go, I got started late, I couldn’t find the right white chocolate and it was one thing after the next from there on…

The chocolate cream—a basic egg yolk and cornstarch pudding—which I’ve been making since I was about six years old, was the first disaster. Lumps. Hundreds of tiny, and not so tiny, lumps. I saw it coming but forged ahead anyway. Out came the strainer. Got the big ones–but plenty of the little ones remained.

Then it was the white chocolate cream which was meant also to be the frosting. As I said, I didn’t have the right chocolate so I used Ghirardelli which is usually fine. Not this time. The frosting curdled and just generally behaved poorly. And it was too sweet and, well, weird, evaporated milk weird—a little vanilla and a dash of orange extract gave it some depth and a bit of an edge—but it still wasn’t what I had hoped for.

The cake itself was good enough, although it didn’t really have the delicate crumb and gleaming finish of the one in the book. (I added about a tablespoon of fresh orange zest which was a nice touch I think.)

The clock was ticking away and the white chocolate filling was unusable as an outer coating…at the last minute I made a Seven Minute Frosting. Sliced the layers, filled, frosted, and decorated–with those rather sad little chocolate shards. Finished just in time for the three-hour chilling it demanded.

As far as the construction, I was pretty pleased. It wasn’t rounded or lopsided and it did present fairly well. It looked better in real life (maybe it was the wine). The chocolate cream was wonderful, lumps and all, and the buttermilk cake was a keeper. But, as you can see it left perhaps a little something to be desired…

 

 

Would I make it again? I don’t think so—or, more to the point, not the way the recipe is written. Although I do still love the look of it, or maybe the idea of the look of it, and it tasted like a really delicious wedding cake, the kind we used to have at Italian-American weddings when I was kid. What I especially liked was that it was a cake best served cold—I love a cold cake.

Which brings me back to Dorie Greenspan and Tuesdays with Dorie. Twice now I’ve been overcome with desire by one of Greenspan’s recipes–and her recent book is full of others I’d like to try with their mingling of French sensibilities and American tastes. Although I think I’ll skip some of the fruit pies and other things I make now by heart—and the “Chocolate Blueberry Ice Cream” is just too painful to contemplate.

The “Black and White Chocolate Cake,” while not an unqualified success has led me however to join a fun baking group and to start keeping this blog—a diversion from all things History all the time. So, I’ll be embarking on the next TWD recipe soon–and others as they pop up–and I’ll chronicle them here.

Tuesday, as the name suggests, will be the day to see the TWD featured recipes. And be sure to check out the other bloggers and the really amazing and beautiful work they do.

 

 

Flirting with Disaster

It was love at first sight. One look and I knew it would be mine.

The first go was not all that impressive–the crust cooked too fast and darkened unattractively and the frangipane lacked a certain je ne sais quoi (turned out a little almond extract did the trick)–but the second–well I think the picture says it all.

The recipe was created by Dorie Greenspan–known to baking diehards for, among others, the magisterial Baking with Julia. It was part of a 2005 Bon Appetit feature on French home-baked desserts, and though it was delicious and beautiful, I don’t think I’ve made this tart since. So many tarts too little time. But I can’t remember being more visually seduced by a recipe in a long time.

Until last week. It came as no surprise that when trawling for a dinner party dessert I came across another Greenspan recipe whose beauty moved me to give up my plans with a banana cream pie and flirt with disaster.

To be continued…