Baking Bouchon - Recipe 88 & 89: Raspberry & Lemon Macarons

This is kind of a weird post because I made these macarons at totally different times.

The raspberry version I made in December with a friend of mine.  They turned out really well, but I neglected to take any pictures while making them.  I barely remembered to take pictures of the finished macarons.  I think I was too excited about having company in the kitchen that I was just enjoying the experience which was a nice change up.

The cookies themselves are almost identical to the vanilla macarons in this cookbook except that you leave out the vanilla bean seeds and add pink food coloring.  So honestly, the macarons aren't raspberry at all - they're just blank canvases for raspberry filling.  The filling is French Buttercream with Raspberry Jam mixed in.  My guest and I both agreed that the filling didn't have enough raspberry flavor in it so we added more jam.  We also decided it wasn't pink enough so we added pink food coloring.

These were pretty successful with about half of the cooking baking up beautifully without exploding.  In my limited macaron experience, that's pretty darn good.

I had far less success a few months later when I made the lemon macarons.  The macaron cookie here is the same as the raspberry in that it has no lemon in it - just yellow food coloring.

I don't know what happened - I did what I've always done and cooked up some sugar, whipped it into egg whites to make a meringue and folded that into almond flour and powdered sugar.

Piped them out and baked them.

And then they cracked.  All of them.

I take that back - all but six of them.  This was ridiculous and irritating and a total waste of time because there was no way I was letting anyone see these things outside of these four walls.

I had already made the filling so I figured I might as well sandwich all the hideous cookies and photograph only the three that weren't completely exploded.

The filling was pretty awesome - a mix of buttercream frosting and lemon curd.  The lemon curd was amazing and really made me regret my decision to use store bought lemon curd in the lemon meringue tarts instead of making the recipe in the Bouchon cookbook.  It was super tart and oh so creamy because of the butter that gets blended into it.  Mixing it with the buttercream gave it an even richer texture.  It was really freakin' delicious.

Since I was too embarrassed to share all but three of these (which I didn't do because who shows up somewhere with three cookies?) I have to eat them all myself.  I'll let CA and my mom help me but no one else will be subject to these ugly yet delicious treats.

Enjoy!
Julie

Peanut Butter Pretzel Brownies

I feel like I've made these before, but I haven't.  Luckily, I have this blog so that I can look back over my baking adventures and see if I've made something before.  Evidence has proven that I've never made Peanut Butter Pretzel Brownies.  I have, however, made two versions of Peanut Butter, Pretzel, Marshmallow Brownies.  That's still a little too close for my taste, but when you've got a bunch of chocolate, pretzels and peanuts lying around this sort of thing tends to happen.

Before we talk about brownies, can we talk about how easy it is to make peanut butter?

All you have to do is blend up peanuts in the food processor.  First you end up with chopped peanuts, then ground peanuts, then slightly sticky ground peanuts, but if you keep going and going you get smooth peanut butter.  It doesn't taste exactly like your regular old Skippy or Jiff but it definitely tastes like those natural peanut butters.  I used raw, unsalted peanuts, so I added some salt to it to make it tastier but use whatever peanuts you have lying around and then add salt at the end once you figure out if it's any good.  This also works with other nuts... almonds, cashews, sunflower seeds, etc.  I'm tempted to take all the nuts out of my pantry and grind them all up together to create the most kumbaya version of nut butter you've ever seen.

To make these brownies you basically make 2 batters - a regular brownie and then a peanut butter batter.

The peanut butter gets sandwiched in between the brownie batter.  Top the whole thing up with barely crushed up pretzels.  I used 3 cups of pretzels because that was what I had - but they didn't all stick very well to the top so you can reduce that if you want to.  What I HIGHLY recommend doing is to put all of the pretzel salt that has fallen to the bottom of the bag on top of the brownies.  If there isn't any (which would be weird) you should sprinkle a little extra course salt on top.  It definitely adds to the whole "salty-sweet" thing which is what makes these brownies so good.

These are definitely in the cake brownie camp, not the fudgey brownie camp.  I prefer my brownies fudgey but I still really enjoyed these.  They're sweet and a little bit chewy and have the perfect combination of sweet and salty.

Peanut Butter Pretzel Brownies
Adapted from Brownies To Die For

Ingredients

For the Brownies
4 oz Unsweetened Chocolate
2/3 cup Butter
1 cup Sugar
1 cup Brown Sugar
4 Eggs
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 1/4 cup Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Salt
6 oz. Dark Chocolate Chips

For the Peanut Butter Swirl
3/4 cup Peanut Butter (crunchy or creamy)
1/3 cup Butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
3 T Flour
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 T Milk
2 Eggs

3 cups Pretzels, slightly crushed
Salt at the bottom of the pretzel bag (or 1/2 - 1 tsp Course Salt)

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.   Line a 9"x13" pan with parchment paper.  Spray the parchment paper with non-stick spray.

In a medium saucepan, melt the unsweetened chocolate and butter over medium heat.  Remove from the pot from the heat.  Stir in the sugar, brown sugar, eggs and vanilla.  Add the flour, baking powder and salt and stir until combined.  Let cool for 10 minutes and then mix in the chocolate chips.

In a medium bowl mix together the peanut butter and butter until completely smooth.  Add the brown sugar and flour and mix until combined.  Add the vanilla, milk and eggs and mix until combined.

Add half of the brownie mixture to the prepared pan and spread it evenly.  Drop all of the peanut butter mixture on top of the brownie mixture and spread as much as you can to cover the base layer of brownie batter.  Top that with the remaining brownie mixture and spread as evenly as possible.  Use a knife to swirl the batter in the pan so that you can see bits of both the brownie and peanut butter batters.  Sprinkle the crushed pretzels and salt on top and press them down lightly so they adhere to the batter.

Bake for 45 minutes.  Cool completely, remove from the pan and cut into squares.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 87: Lemon Meringue Tarts

Don't get mad but I totally cheated.  The impending move is making me crazy!  I am completely obsessed with emptying my pantry before we move and it means I've been eating the weirdest foods.  The other day I ate rice mixed with a piece of cheese and a cut up hot dog for dinner.  It was strangely good.  I've also been forcing myself to eat these packets of Cream of Wheat that I bought and I hate.  I thought it would be an alternative than my typical work breakfast of oatmeal.  It's disgusting, but I keep eating it.  My friend makes fun of me because she says that what I'm forcing myself to eat costs approximately $0.50 and I spend way more than that on my daily coffee.

My cheating here consisted of using a jar of Lemon Curd for these Lemon Meringue Tarts instead of making my own.  I've made the lime version of the curd in the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook and it's amazing so I'm sure that the lemon version is also amazing, but I couldn't make lemon curd when I had a jar sitting in my cupboard.  I just couldn't.

The base of the tart is Pâte Sucreé which I've made a few times and is a pretty easy sugar cookie recipe.  The tarts don't get baked again once they're filled so the shells need to be fully baked when they're empty.  I was supposed to use these special individual tart shells, but I reused the English Muffins molds I recently bought which I thought was genius.  Plus, they worked perfectly so it pretty much was genius.

There are 3 layers of goodness inside of these tarts.

1. Madeleine Cake - a lemon cake that I've made before but this time the batter is spread really thin in a baking sheet so the cake is super skinny.  After it's baked it's cut into circles that fit in the bottom of the baked tart shell.
2. Lemon Curd - my fraudulent curd is the next layer inside the tart
3. Meringue - standard meringue is piped on top - egg whites whipped with a hot sugar syrup until it's nice and fluffy.

I'm pretty disappointed in myself because this was my opportunity to buy a blow torch and I didn't do it.  The recipe says to use a little kitchen torch to brown the meringue on the top of the tart.  CA says that I can't be trusted with a blow torch which is probably true given that I've set myself on fire before, but I really want to caramelize sugar and meringue with a blow torch.  It's so much more fun that putting it under the broiler in the oven.  BORING!

Overall these are pretty awesome.  I wish they had been a little bit more tart - but they probably would have been if I'd made my own curd.  Whatever - I knocked out a Bouchon recipe AND got rid of a random pantry item.  My obsession trumps everything.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 86: Nougat aux Fruits

Can you see my skepticism from there?  There's nothing about these things that I should like.  They're pretty much named after dried fruit.

But (gasp) I like them!  Maybe because the name says fruits, there are only a few dried cranberries in here (the least offensive of the dried fruits) but it's really all about the nougat.

Someone asked me what nougat is and I had a hard time describing it to them.  I settled on "the stuff inside of a Snickers bar - not the caramel or chocolate or nuts, the other stuff."  It's the best I can do.

Nougat is kind of cool.  It's like making marshmallows where you pour hot syrup into egg whites and beat the crap out of it, however this nougat also has a honey-based syrup in it which gives it a much more complex flavor than a regular old marshmallow.  Plus it has melted cocoa butter in it which makes it super rich.

While the nougat is still hot, you mix in some pistachios, almonds and dried cranberries. 

My sugar creations don't always set up exactly like they're supposed to, so I was very happy when I made my first cut and it held together and you could see the pretty nuts and cranberries in there.  The green pistachios are my favorite.  That combined with the red cranberries was like Christmas.

I brought this to work and someone came up to me and said "You made Gaz."

I had no idea what she was talking about but apparently there is a Persian dessert named Gaz which is just like this French dessert.  Go figure.  I'm sure at some point in history someone conquered someone else and taught them to make this stuff but I don't know much about history.  I can hardly keep up with the present.

I took way too many pictures of this stuff.

This wasn't a treat for everyone - the ones I brought to work didn't disappear as fast as most of my treats and CA's coworkers were pretty skeptical.

However, I was surprised that I found Nougat aux Fruits to be pretty delicious and strangely addicting.  I kept going back for more trying to figure out exactly why I liked it so much.  For me, I think it was the honey.

Enjoy!
Julie

Coconut Butterscotch Cookies

I freakin' love these cookies.  I've made them at least a dozen times and each time I make them I get so excited and gobble them all up.  Then I forget about them and then I remember and then I make them again and then I'm happy all over again.

What I love about them is that they're just as easy to make as a chocolate chip cookie but they are so much more unique.  Plus you don't have to buy anything crazy to put in them - just coconut and butterscotch chips.  The butterscotch in here adds so much richness I can hardly stand it.

Recently I bought a pint of Ben & Jerry's Scotchy Scotch Scotch which is a limited edition flavor in honor of the new Anchor Man movie which I haven't seen and has no bearing on my ice cream purchasing motivations.  It's butterscotch ice cream with butterscotch swirls. At the same time I also bought a pint of vanilla and another one called Everything but the...  I brought these to a little birthday celebration where cupcakes were also served and everyone raved about this butterscotch ice cream.  Including me, it was my favorite.

I'm not sure why I just told you all of that except that talking about butterscotch chips made me remember that ice cream and how good it was.

What I should really do is get more of that ice cream and serve it with these cookies.  Mind blown.

I challenge you to make these cookies and not to eat the dough.  I fail every time, but that's not unusual.

I'm not sure what else to tell you other than that these are really good, which I already told you, so just go make them already.

Coconut Butterscotch Cookies
Recipe from Williams Sonoma

Ingredients
1 1/3 cups All Purpose Flour
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1/2 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 cup Sugar
1/2 cup Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Butter, at room temperature
1 Egg
1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 1/2 cups Coconut
1 1/2 cups Butterscotch Chips (I use the whole bag)

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.  Line your baking sheets with a silpat or parchment paper.

In a medium bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.

Add the sugar, brown sugar and butter to the bowl of a stand mixer.  Beat on medium speed with the paddle attachment until fluffy, about 3 minutes.  Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix on low speed until just incorporated.  Add the flour mixture in two additions and mix on low speed until just incorporated. 

Drop 1" balls of dough onto the prepared baking sheet.  Bake for 15 minutes, or until the edges are nice and golden brown.

Enjoy!
Julie

Field Trip

I really wish I had field trips like this in grade school - I always ended up at some power plant or the zoo or some nerdy math competition (I really was in a math competition which is further evidence of what a dork I truly am).  No one every took me to a bakery and if they had, I might have chosen a different career path... Technically, I now have no career path since I stopped working last week in preparation for the big move.  Retirement rocks!

I went to the Bouchon Bakery people!  A few weeks ago, I took a trip to NYC to celebrate a friend's 30th birthday because I'm way older than all my friends but in addition to celebrating, I forced everyone to accompany me to the Bouchon Bakery in Rockefeller Center so I could gorge on the treats I've been making for over a year now and see how mine stacked up.

This wouldn't have been so much torture if it hadn't been sleet/snowing and I didn't make them all stand outside for 10 minutes while CA tried to figure out how to get our camera off of the "Food" setting and onto a setting that takes decent pictures of humans.

The biggest problem I had during my visit was to decide what to eat.  I only had 3 other people with me so I tried not to go TOO crazy ordering things and I was fairly conservative during my first trip through the line.

It was all so pretty and shiny and well lit that I had a hard time deciding what to get.  Plus, we'd just spent a few hours at Eataly eating lunch and browsing food products so we weren't exactly starving.

We started off with a Cream Puff, Bouchon, TKO, Chocolate Croissant and a couple of Macarons.  I wanted to get a good cross section of the different chapters of the cookbook which I think I did pretty well.

I wasted no time digging in!

The Cream Puff was awesome and had the added bonus of a little bit of caramel inside in addition to the pastry cream. 

The TKO was very dark chocolatey, just as I remember but the filling was far more successful than the runny mess I made.

The Bouchon was a yummy little brownie bite, exactly what I expected.

The Chocolate Croissant was also very tasty and perfectly delicate and flaky.

The Macarons were hit or miss.  The vanilla one was excellent but the other flavors tasted pretty stale which was quite disappointing.

When we devoured those treats, I went back for a few more...  A Better Nutter and even more Macarons.

The rest of the Macarons were stale too which was even more disappointing.

However, the Better Nutter was my absolutely favorite thing I ate at the bakery.  It was rich and sweet and a little bit salty.  Super yummy!  If I hadn't been on the verge of getting sick, I would have finished it off.

My favorite thing about going to the bakery was the validation that I'm doing a pretty good job executing these recipes.  They haven't all been perfect, but I'd give myself a solid "Pass".  I wonder if I can convince Thomas Keller to let me run one of these in Korea.

Enjoy!
Julie

Granola Clusters

The last time I made Granola it was good but it didn't stick together like I feel like Granola should.  I don't really use Granola in a way that is conducive to small bits.  I want clusters that I can pick up with my hand and stuff in my face.  So, when I stumbled upon this recipe from Cookies and Cups which claims to be "snacking granola clusters" I was excited to try it.

This time I did not make any modifications to the sugar levels in the granola.  I know that this is key to making it stick together so I put in the full amount of honey and brown sugar that the recipe called for.  The recipe also contains an egg white which I found interesting but the original poster said it contributed to stick-togetherness so I definitely kept that in there.

The one change I did make was to substitute Rice Chex for the Corn Flakes so that the recipe would be Gluten Free.  Also, I like Rice Chex and knew I'd eat the rest of them while half a box of corn flakes would simply create more stuff for me to get rid of.

Oh yeah, and I left out the chocolate chips because this isn't dessert.

And I left out the raisins because they are disgusting.

And I added almonds.

All the ingredients get mixed up together and baked.

The big difference in this granola is the baking process.  You do NOT stir the granola at any point once it starts baking - that's why it stays in clumps.

The original instructions called for baking the granola for 30 minutes and then turning the oven off and letting it cool in the oven.  I did that and I wasn't happy with the level of browning I got.  The bottom was fine but the top was still very blonde.   So, I turned the broiler on for a few minutes to get the heat on the top of the granola going and then turned it off and let it cool again.  It worked perfectly!
 

I absolutely love how this stuff came out.  My favorite part is that it's a little bit salty from the salted cashews.  I never thought to put cashews in granola before but I absolutely adore them!  The final product stayed in big chunks that I could hold in my hand and snack on.  Perfect.

I made this gluten free for my friend, but I would not change a single thing about this in the future even if I was serving a pack of gluten lovers (like myself).

Granola Clusters
Adapted from Cookies and Cups

Ingredients

5 cups Oatmeal
1/2 cup Butter, melted
1/2 cup + 2 T Brown Sugar
1/2 cup Honey
2 cups Coconut (flaked or dessicated)
4 cups Rice Chex, crushed
1 1/2 tsp Salt
1 cup Salted Cashews (peanuts would be great too - just make sure they're salted)
1/2 cup Sliced Almonds
1 Egg White, lightly beaten

Instructions

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.  Line a baking sheet with sides with a silpat or parchment paper.

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl until evenly coated with butter and honey. 

Spread the mixture onto the prepared baking sheet.   Bake for 30 minutes without stirring.  Turn the broiler on and broil until the top barely starts to turn golden brown (no more than 5 minutes).  Turn the oven off.  Peek at it after 5 minutes, if the top if getting more too brown, open the oven door for a  couple of minutes.  Then close the oven door and  allow the granola to stay in the oven until it is completely cooled.

Break into pieces.

Enjoy!

Julie