Bread pudding. The words themselves are hardly inspiring. Stodgy, pedestrian, British, with those overtones of school dining halls and hospital food. There are some truly execrable bread puddings — dry, almost crusty, with little discernible flavor other than that provided by a few sugary raisins, and no give. And frankly, most bread puddings I’ve had in even the best bakeries and restaurants have been in this mold — cut into neat squares and utterly unappetizing.
But a good homemade bread pudding is a different beast. This is spoon food, creamy and gooey and served warm from the oven in a bowl. Bread and milk and eggs and sugar combine to form an alchemy — no longer distinct elements but something altogether new and wonderful. Comforting and exciting all at once, bread pudding has the potential to hit exactly the right dessert spot.
Bread puddings can range from the basic bread and butter pudding, also known as “make a dessert from things in your pantry” to the very fancy indeed. This one is somewhere in between. It is an easy bread pudding, make no mistake about that. And most of the ingredients are in my pantry, but the basic sandwich bread and milk and eggs is kicked up a notch — the bread is a brioche (the best bread for bread pudding hands down, if you can find it), spread with a sweet and tart raspberry jam. The custard is thickened with cream and scented with the floral aromas of Tahitian vanilla extract and Amontillado sherry. And to top it off, the pudding is taken from the pedestrian to the porsche with a topping of creamy, dreamy, meringue, browned to perfection.
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Tags: baking·dessert·Easter·Entertaining·holiday·sweets
One of the things I truly love about cooking is the sense of community that’s created around food. Not just the bloggers and their social media, the chefs and their late night hangouts or even the people around your dinner table, but the broader community that comes from the sharing of recipes. Every time I cook something from a recipe, I’m connected to the hundreds (thousands) of people who have cooked the recipe before (or something very similar. In cooking, like in so many things, there is nothing new under the sun) and when I am finding myself particularly prone to flights of fancy, I imagine sitting in a shadowy quilting bee with all the people who are sharing the secrets of the kitchen with me….
Of course, the best kind of recipes are ones that come from people you actually know, because not only are they approved by a source you trust, the act of cooking that recipe connects you to the recipe’s giver … These molasses cookies,which come from my friend Kas, are a recipe like that. Every time I make these molasses cookies, which are chewy in the middle, slightly crisp around the edges, and ridiculously, unbelievably “more”ish, I think of Kas, and it makes the cookies taste just that much sweeter.
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Tags: baking·cookies·dessert·sweets·Vegetarian
I am not the most precise of cooks. I take shortcuts, measure by eyesight, play fast and loose with recipes. I never use cake flour, rarely sift anything, freely substitute ingredients. And most of the time, things turn out very well indeed. Some people would say, “Oh, you’re a cook, you’re not a baker. Baking must be done with precision!” But I do bake quite a bit, and while baking requires MORE precision than cooking (I would not suggest, for example, leaving out baking powder altogether), there’s still quite a bit of wiggle room, and most things come out just fine, even with my wild and crazy ways.
Macarons are not one of those things.
The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S of Baking Without Fear. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.
If you’ve never had a macaron, you should. These are not the gooey, coconut confections ubiquitous at Passover, but French almond cookies similar to meringues sandwiched together with a creamy filling. A properly made macaron has a smooth, crisp shell over dainty, ruffled “feet”, and when you bite into it, you get first the crunch exterior shell then chewy almondy macaroon then creamy filling. In Parisian patisseries (where they are all the rage), you can find them in a glorious rainbow of colors and flavors. Trust me, when made properly, they are a treat.
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Tags: baking·Daring Bakers·Gluten Free·Macarons
