Quiche is for everyone

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baking, postaday2016, quiche

Whoever came up with the saying “real men don’t eat quiche” most likely never tasted quiche in their life, a quiche is basically an omelette in a pie crust and you never hear of real men refusing omelettes. I made both quiches at once, so they are identical, ham and cheese quiche, the cheese being Swiss cheese and the ham is your run of the mill domestic ham. I made the pie crust in my food processor, it makes it so easy to bring the flour, salt, butter, Crisco and ice water together in a ball of dough. All I had to do was press it down into a disk, cover it up in Saran Wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. The filling besides the slices of ham and Swiss cheese was a mixture of 3 eggs, 1 cup of heavy cream, salt, pepper and nutmeg. I baked both of them in a 400 degree oven for 40 minutes, I’m having heating issues with my oven, so you might not need to keep the heat so high for so long, the idea of the 400 degrees is to get the golden crust, once that is achieved, usually 10 to 15 minutes, then you lower the temperature to 350 degrees until a knife comes out clean which is about 35 minutes later.

My husband and our daughter raved over the quiche, at the rate they are eating it, I did the right thing making two quiches, at least with two, I’m guaranteed a slice or two, lol.

What to do with extra egg yolks….

Tags

baking, postaday2016

Make a Parisian flan, without a crust, just the custard, think of it as a custard pie, if you will. My mother’s favorite treat or at least one of them, she loves to eat it for breakfast, which is exactly what I did this morning, it was delicious; nice and eggy, firm yet soft on the throat going down, I thoroughly enjoyed it with my morning coffee.

It’s only a little tricky to make, you have to make a custard, rich and thick with the egg yolks and hot milk flavored with sugar and vanilla without making scrambled eggs since you make it over heat. The secret is to temper the egg mixture slowly and gently with a tiny bit of the hot milk mixture at a time before you can incorporate the eggs completely into the hot milk. I have had my share of scrambled eggs and that’s when you start all over again from scratch, a tedious process I will confess, but necessary if you want a delicious flan.

I didn’t make a crust because I find that it detracts from the flan itself and the flan is so firm, it doesn’t need the stability of a pie crust, it stands very well on its own. Also, sometimes it’s nice to have less work when you’re baking, not all the time, just sometimes.

Little almond cakes

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baking, postaday2016

My husband asked for something sweet and this is what he got, little almond cakes. In France, they are called financiers, here I would call them “little cakes” or mini muffins. They are different in their composition from our type of muffins in that the recipe calls for egg whites and “beurre noisettes” or brown butter in the batter. They also go in a very hot oven, 450 degrees for 7 minutes after which you turn down the oven to 400 degrees (still hot) for 7 minutes, after which you turn off the oven and leave them in the oven for another 7 minutes after which you take them out.

I had a nice time in my kitchen, baking is fun and I love all of it, the preparation, the stress of actual baking and the clean up, it is all good in my book. 

Baking for the office Christmas party

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baking, party, postaday2015, tarts

   
 
My doctors have set up my remaining appointments; Friday I meet with the doctor who will be performing the endoscopic ultrasound on Monday morning, January 5th I meet with the psychologist and January 6th I meet with the surgeon, so there is serious movement being made by my doctors and nurses, comforting and unsettling at the same time.

So what better to occupy my thoughts then by playing with butter, flour, eggs, chocolate, heavy cream, pears and sugar? I made two chocolate and pear tarts, one for the Christmas office party and one for the children, they do not like it when their favorite pie leaves the house without them. Lol So I found it is best if I just make two, much less complaining.

It’s been awhile since I made them, they look good, they smelled tasty as they were baking, I hope they taste how they smelled, I always get nervous when I bring something to strangers. There will be other treats, so maybe it will get lost among the others. I’ll wait for the children’s verdict. I’m sure the pies are fine, I get so crazy insecure even after all this time as a home baker, I’m so silly sometimes. Lol

Our pastry chef in residence

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baking, chef, pastry, postaday2015

   
 
Our daughter spent yesterday afternoon making cheese Danishes, her first time and they were delicious! She made them because she had promised her very good friend two years ago that she would make him cheese Danishes, well yesterday he got his wish. Trust me when I say that they were more then worth the wait, I had made cheese Danishes myself some time ago, my source of inspiration was my mother, mine weren’t as delicious as our daughter’s. Our daughter’s friend made out better than my mother did. 😀

   
 
She not only made tasty Danishes, but she remains the queen of chocolate chip cookies. Her cookies are to die for and I make sure that when she is preparing to make them, she has people lined up to eat those cookies, she can’t leave me alone with her cookies because once I have one, I can’t stop, I haven’t the proper discipline necessary to stop at one.

There I admitted it, I am powerless over my daughter’s cookies and her baking powers in general. LOL

She has talent, that one.

Putting Christmas to bed and away

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baking, doldrums, postaday2015, winter

The house is back to rights, I am a little sad about it, Christmas decorations make any home cheerier during dreary winter days; no matter how much work it is, I always enjoy putting up all of our decorations. However, putting everything away puts me in a bah humbug kind of a mood. The thought of spending month after cold month pining away for Spring puts me in the doldrums. Maybe I am afflicted with lack of adequate sunlight syndrome that many people suffer from these winter months. I don’t know, but I am going to patiently wait for Spring to arrive and find some way to appreciate winter by refocusing my energies on soup making, baking and other types of cooking.

Our son the baker

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baking, Jack, postaday2014

Yesterday was the first time that our son had ever expressed the slightest interest in baking. He decided that he wanted to make brownies and he asked for my advice on two things and that was it. He calmly and quietly followed the instructions, asking me about the pros and cons between oil versus butter and what size baking pan to use, other than that he measured, mixed and prepped the pan on his own. His brownies came out beautifully, without a single crumb clinging to the pan. I told him that simply that fact alone was impressive for anyone’s first time. His friend just happened to arrive the moment that the brownies were ready to come out and our son poured a tall glass of milk for himself and his friend and they both went upstairs to play their video games.

Jack was well aware that something good was in the oven, even though we all told him that he couldn’t have any brownies, that didn’t stop him from being as cute as can be, in case we changed our mind. Don’t worry we didn’t change our minds, we are immune to his wily charms when it comes to food.

One Christmas cookie begets another

Tags

baking, financiers, postaday2014, tea cookies

This coming Friday is my good friend Mary’s annual Christmas cookie swap so I made 6 dozen Breton butter cookies; they are more like a shortbread cookie, not sweet, but very buttery and I would say perfect with tea. I felt like making a cookie that I had never made before and it was fun experimenting. The butter cookie isn’t difficult to make at all; it requires 6 egg yolks, 1 1/4 cups of sugar, creamed together and then you add 1 cup of room temperature butter cut up into pieces. The butter is key to the cookie, to be the proper cookie you need to use the best butter possible. I found French butter from my local supermarket, the reason why I sought out French butter is because it is salted in proportion that the cookie wants. It is after that the butter is incorporated into the creamed eggs and sugar that you add a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla and then one cup at a time, you add 4 cups of all purpose flour, unbleached is the one that I use. You will get a thick, heavy dough. You roll it into a log and wrap it in saran wrap, chill it for at least a half hour and then you can slice the roll into at least 1/2 inch slices and put the slices onto a cookie sheet; as a decorative detail, you score each cookie with a fork’s tin and brush an egg wash over each cookie and then into the oven at 325 for about 30 minutes.

My husband and our son both were not huge fans of the breton butter “biscuit”, they were not saddened at the prospect of 6 dozen of those cookies leaving the house on Friday. I am not offended, I was busy mixing up a batch of batter to get rid of the 12 egg whites that I had left over. The batter in question is another French confectionary treat called the financier, it is a almond tea cake consisting of almond meal, all purpose flour, melted butter, confectioner’s sugar and egg whites. There are many recipes on the web, I found one that corresponded to the amount of egg whites I had and I went from there. The only two things that I did differently was use regular sugar because I didn’t have confectioner’s sugar, so instead of adding 1 1/2 cups, I used 1 cup of regular sugar and I used my Kitchen Aid mixer. I mixed the flour, sugar, salt, and almond meal and then I added the egg whites and the melted butter. I ladled the batter into buttered mini muffin tins and baked them at 400 degrees for about ten minutes.

So I told my husband that I only made these to use up the egg whites, this was before he had tasted one. He wasn’t crazy about the butter cookies, but boy does he love the financier, our son feels the same way as well. My baking worked out well in the end; I like the butter cookies, I can see my friends enjoying them with a spot of tea or even coffee after spending hours writing Christmas cards or wrapping presents.

Experiments with quince

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apples, baking, postaday2014, quince

I was telling my friend Tilly that with my children away from the house, either on tour or at university, I really miss baking and cooking for them; so much so that I fantasized about baking goodies and dropping them off to someone’s house under the cover of darkness just to get my baking fix. Tilly of course had a better plan; look into Food banks, homeless shelters or retirement homes who would benefit from my need to bake. She is such a wonderful friend full of wisdom and common sense.

I can think of someone else, Debbie my best friend, who would be loving a certain type of pie, I have been thinking about it for a while, I just have to coordinate my time to do a home delivery to her house; ever since she moved away from next door, it is hard to cook and bake for her the way I used to when it was only a skip and a jump to her front door.

Anyway just as I was writing back and forth with Tilly, my son came home early from his tour and as soon as he got in, I served him a bowl of soup and got to work on an apple clafoutis.

A clafoutis is essentially a batter type cake with fruit in it; traditionally it is full of pitted cherries, but you can make it with apricots, pears or apples. I chose apples because A. I had five apples waiting in the refrigerator for someone to do something with them and B I had picked a bunch of quince from my quince bush and I wanted to bake them into something, so why not a clafoutis.

The clafoutis batter comprises of 4 eggs, 4 tablespoons of sugar, 2/3 cups of flour( I did 1/3 cup of unbleached flour, 1/3 almond meal) 1 cup of milk ( I used 1 cup of buttermilk) and you whisk these together and pour it over the fruit that is in a buttered pie dish.

I looked through various recipes involving quince and apples and they all pointed to a quince compote which calls for peeling and dicing 4 quince and adding them to 4 cups of water, 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 cinnamon sticks that have come to a boil and the sugar has dissolved and you let them cook for about an hour. The house smelled like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

I pulled the quince off the heat, it looked like compote and tasted sweet with a pleasing note of tart and cinnamon. I gently spread the compote on the bottom of the pie dish and then after I peeled, cored and sliced up the apples, I sautéed them for a few minutes in 2 tablespoons of butter before piling them into the buttered pie dish, that is when I poured the batter over the fruit and put it in a 400 degree oven for about 45 minutes.

My son has been eating soup and has been eating clafoutis since his return; makes a Maman proud and very happy.

Apricot blooms

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apricot, baking, blooms, postaday2014

As I was walking past the window, the color of apricot caught the corner of my eye and when I turned to get a better look, I couldn’t believe how many open blooms I had on my favorite hibiscus. I have always loved the color of apricot; the first time that I decorated my own room when I was seventeen, previously I had always shared a room with my little sister, I chose the color apricot as the color scheme. I remember going to the Laura Ashley store in the upper East side with my mother to pick from all of the beautiful wall coverings, borders and accessories. That store was so tasteful and sophisticated, I felt like a grownup picking out samples from their huge books, sitting on a settee, beautifully upholstered in a rich brocade fabric.

I remember baking a flambeed apricot tart for my 18th birthday celebration in France, I had also baked an apple tart as well. We were so many at the house that one tart wasn’t enough and I didn’t want to make two of the same, I wanted to experiment and expand my baking experience and repertoire.

I’m pretty sure that the tart that I had made all those years ago, looked very much like the one in the picture. My love affair with baking started even before this, I started baking in my early teens and as I got better, I loved it even more. There is nothing like seeing the appreciation in someone’s eyes when they taste your homemade dessert, it fills you with such a wonderful feeling that you want to do it even more.