Lemon Thyme Roast Chicken

I'll keep this post short and sweet.

I read quite a few blogs on a daily basis.  Most of them make me feel like my blog is awkward and doesn't look nearly as nice as other blogs.  I use a standard design from Blogger and have only done a little bit of customization.  I've had thoughts of paying someone to design this space into something that looks more professional but haven't gotten there yet.

Looks aside (although her blog looks totally legit) I've been loving the recipes that are posted on The View From Great Island lately.  I can't remember how I stumbled on this blog but I've been really enjoying it.  (BTW, I don't know this lady at all and she doesn't know me so there's no particular reason for me to be telling you about her blog except that I like it and I got this recipe from her).

This roasted chicken is super simple to make and tastes awesome!  I served it to my book club ladies and was really happy with how it came out.  The lemon flavor is bright and fresh but it gets a little bit of a concentrated, richer flavor from being roasted.

You can find the recipe HERE.  The original recipe calls for a whole chicken that has been cut up, but I used all chicken legs.  I also removed the skin before cooking them to pump up the healthy factor.  Oh yeah, and I cheated and used regular lemons and not meyer lemons because my grocery store didn't have them.  I'm practical that way.

Enjoy!
Julie

Gluten Free Crepes

I talk a lot about my Gluten Free Friend (GFF) on this blog.  She's a pretty amazing person with a lot of qualities that have nothing to do with her Gluten Free Status, but she's really my only friend with this status so I have to talk about her a lot when it comes to food.  She's pretty useful that way and luckily she doesn't mind me using her as an example.

My GFF is part of my book club and since I made the Crepe Cake I told you about yesterday for my favorite book reading ladies I was adamant that she be able to partake so I found this recipe for crepes that contain none of those pesky glutens.  It is made with potato starch which I was highly skeptical of.  The other ingredients are the same as regular crepes - water, eggs, milk, sugar, vanilla and salt.

This experiment in crepes free of flour didn't start off all that well.  I mixed up the batter and proceeded to heat up my non-stick skillet.  Once hot, I poured in the batter and let it cook.  However, when I tried to flip it it completely fell apart (see photo above, right).  I was discouraged... sad face... but when I revisited my batter to try again I noticed that letting the batter sit for even a minute caused the potato starch to separate and settle to the bottom of the bowl.  Without the potato starch, I had essentially cooked milky eggs.  I re-whisked and immediately poured the batter in the pan.... so much better!  It stayed together and was significantly crepe-like.

I used these crepes along with the orange diplomat cream that I used in the Crepe Cake to make my GFF a Mini GF Crepe Cake.  She was pleased and I was pleased that she was pleased.

These are a great staple and I could see them filled with fruit and whipped cream or whatever your crepe pleasure may be.

Gluten Free Crepes
Adapted from Feel Good Eating
Makes 4 Crepes

Ingredients
3 T Potato Starch
1/2 cup Water
1/2 cup Milk
1 Egg
Pinch of Salt
1 tsp Sugar
1/4 tsp Vanilla Extract

Instructions
Whisk all the ingredients together, making sure to incorporate all the potato starch.  Scoop 1/4 cup of batter into a hot non-stick skillet coated with cooking spray.  Cook on one side until set and lightly browned, about 1 minute.  Flip and cook until the other side is lightly browned.  Repeat with the remaining batter.

Make sure to re-whisk the batter before making the next crepe to reincorporate any potato starch that has settled to the bottom of the bowl.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 99: Crepe Cake

I can't even count the number of Crepe Cakes that I've pinned on Pinterest (4).  They are made with multiple layers of crepes layered with sweet cream.  It seems to be a pretty popular and anything that has 20 layers of Pastry Cream in it has me sold.  This is the final recipe in the Cake chapter of the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook and I'm super excited about it.

I served this to some of my favorite ladies when I hosted my last book club gathering at my house a few days before the movers showed up.  As usual, it was a fun get together where we caught up on everything going on in each other's lives and the lives of our favorite celebrities.  We also spent at least 5 minutes discussing the book that we read.

A crepe cake obviously starts with a bunch of crepes.  I've only made crepes on one other occasion and the batter seems pretty similar to those I made before.  It is made up of what you'd typically put in pancakes - flour, sugar, eggs, milk and butter.  Plus it contains a tiny bit of triple sec to give them a mild orange flavor.

Crepe batter is very runny which allows it to spread out in a very thin layer in a non-stick skillet.  They're so thin I was worried about ripping them when I flipped them but that did not happen - yeah!

Making this cake required making nearly 20 crepes so there was a lot of pouring batter, swirling batter and flipping crepes.

While the crepes are lovely, the star of this dessert is the orange diplomat creme that is layered in between them.  The diplomat creme is pastry cream scented with orange peel, stabilized with gelatin and folded with whipped cream.  (I talked more about diplomat cream and my love affair with it in the post about dulce de leche eclairs.  My loved has not faded with time.)

The layering process took a little bit of time but is totally worth it.

I was so excited slicing into this thing and I was not disappointed.  This cake is awesome!  The crepes are nice and light and the orange diplomat cream is rich and creamy.  YUM!

Let's recap the cakes in this book, shall we?  I don't remember disliking any of them, but there were a few stand outs...

• This crepe cake for sure - it was freakin' good.
• The Oh Ohs didn't turn out perfectly, but they sure were a a tasty version of the Hostess Ho Ho.
• Bouchons were tasty little brownie bites.
• The Palet d Or was probably my favorite.  It had amazing chocolate flavor and looked so pretty and sophisticated.

Considering that 3 out of 4 of my favorites contain chocolate, I guess there's a trend.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 98: Cheese Puffs

This recipe marks the end of the puffy things chapter.  If I had my cookbook, I could figure out what the chapter is really called, but whatever it is, it is coming to a close on a savory note.

CA was really excited about this recipe.  I think I've been overloading him on sweets and the poor man needed some relief from his sugar coma.  Plus, my superhero is partial to anything that includes cheese.

The dough for the cheese puffs is made in the same way it made for the cream puffs and eclairs - butter is melted with water, cooked with flour and whipped with eggs.  Then comes the grated Gruyere cheese which makes these into cheese puffs.  There is also a good amount of pepper in batter which adds to the savory notes.

The dough gets piped onto a sheet pan and baked until they magically puff in the oven.  Every time I made Pate a Choux (the fancy name for the puffy dough) I'm surprised that it actually puffs when it's baked.

These are pretty darn good and completely addicting.  I made them as an appetizer for CA and I one night and had to hide them from myself to ensure I could actually eat dinner.

Looking back at the recipes in this chapter, I have a really hard time choosing a favorite - they're all pretty awesome.

- The Cream Puffs were super light and tasty
- The Eclairs - including the chocolate, coconut lime and dulce de leche versions were all fantastic.
- Paris-New York which was filled with peanut butter pastry cream was simply out of control.

This may have been the most consistently good chapter in the cookbook.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 97: Tropezienne

These French words really baffle me.  I think I'm too American to figure out where these names come from.  Lord knows what I'm going to do with Korean words.  I may just order food blindly in restaurants and hope that what shows up isn't still moving.

A Tropezienne is a disc of brioche that is filled with pastry cream.  I have no problem with that.

Brioche is kind of awesome.  It's bread with extra butter in it.  How can that be bad? 

This particular version isn't a "roll" like most brioche are - this one is flat and has pearl sugar on top of it.  This makes it look like a hamburger bun.  Forget sesame seeds, I'd rather have my hamburger buns covered in sugar.

To make this look even more like a hamburger, he roll is sliced and filled with a brown substance - the "meat"... and it's not just plain old pastry cream.

The filling is pastry cream (yum) mixed with Nutella (extra yum).  This combination is just ridiculous.

They should sell these at McDonald's.  People would die (literally, if you ate this and a Big Mac, you would bite it earlier than scheduled).  Heck, I'd trade this for a regular hamburger any day.

Luckily, the pastry cream recipe in this cookbook is not aggressively sweet so when it's mixed with the Nutella it doesn't get really sick sweet.  The brioche is awesome and light and the combination is freaking amazing.

I wish I could remember what chapter in the cookbook this recipe came from because it would win the chapter favorite hands down.  It potentially wins "best in show" for the favorite of the whole cookbook, it's that good.

Yummy, happy food day.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 96: Savarins

CA, Sconnie and I are flying to Korea today.  Holy smokes.  As I'm writing this post, it's still a few days away but I'm already getting nervous.  Mostly about putting my sweet puppy in a crate for 20 hours.  I'm worried he'll be scared or completely freak out and attempt to claw his way out.  I want to cry thinking about it.  Instead I will think of baking, it's much happier.

I have never heard of or seen Savarins before.  They are brioche that are soaked in syrup - often times liquor syrup, but in this case, fruit flavored syrup.

The fruit was supposed to be passion fruit, but I couldn't find any fresh passion fruits, frozen passion fruits or passion fruit puree.  I settled on frozen tropical fruits.  I wish this was liquor syrup instead of fruit syrup.  Liquor makes things taste better.

The brioche rolls are made with flour eggs, yeast, butter and a lot of eggs.  It is mixed up and left to rise in a muffin tin.  The recipe suggests using a savarin mold which is something I was not prepared to buy.  Had I made these in the traditional savarin shape, they would have looked like little doughnuts.  Too bad.

The next step is to make the fruit syrup.  I blended up the frozen fruit and cooked it with water, sugar and vanilla beans and then strained it to create a tropical fruit flavored simple syrup.

The final step was to soak the brioche in the syrup.  The book advises that the syrup must be just the right temperature.  If it's too cold, the flavor won't absorb into the bread, but if it's too hot the bread will disintegrate.

My syrup was the exact right temperature when I put my brioche in it to soak but it didn't soak in AT ALL.  I submerged them in the syrup for several minutes even though the recipe didn't indicate that was necessary but it still didn't soak up much syrup at all.  I even tried poking holes in them to get the syrup to seep inside and got zero results.

The savarins are served with whipped cream and diced fruit - in my case mangos.  Unfortunately the savarins were dry on the inside with absolutely no fruit flavor.  I would have been just as happy (which was not very) if I'd just had whipped cream and mangos.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 95: Dutch Crunch Baguettes

There are two more bread recipes after this one.  The proportion of bread recipes to other types of recipes in this cookbook is too high.  It feels like 2:1 - I needed 1:1.

At least this bread is fairly interesting.  The base of the bread is a standard dough but it gets topped with a mixture that is made up primarily of rice flour.  It has other stuff in it that makes it into a thin batter but I have no recollection of what that actually was. (You're all in for some really informative posts as we finish this cookbook where I can't remember what the heck I did - thank God for the pictures I take of all the ingredients or I'd hardly know what was in these baked goods.)

I had zero confidence that the batter on top would actually stay there when I baked it.  I pictured it running down the sides of the dough and depositing itself in the bottom of my oven.  Luckily, I was wrong and it stayed put.

The rice flour batter baked into a crunchy topping that added some really great texture to this bread.  It made it a huge difference in the bread.  The dough itself was a little bit dense for me, but I loved the crunchy topping.

I have a feeling I'll be taking a break from bread baking for a while.  It's just not my favorite thing to make and I don't think it ever turns out that great.  The Bouchon Bakery is famous for its bread, so I don't think it's the recipes, I think it's me.  Maybe I'm just not a bread baker.  I have much better success with things that are full of sugar.  Darn.

Enjoy!
Julie

Spiced Pumpkin Bread

We just dodged a bullet here.  Until three minutes ago, I had no idea where I got the recipe for this pumpkin bread.  It is packed up with all my recipes and cookbooks on a boat in the Pacific Ocean.  I didn't think about setting it aside before we moved and didn't remember that I didn't have it until I sat down today to write.  I had a few other things on my mind.

I could have just skipped telling you about it, even if it is my go-to pumpkin bread recipe but I had already edited and uploaded all the photos, scheduled this post to show up on the blog today and set up a dozen other posts to show up in the coming weeks (that I still need to write).  Deleting this post would have meant that I would have had to go into all the future posts and edit the dates on them which seemed like a lot of work.

Luckily the Internet is freaking amazing and I was able to locate the recipe given what I know about the recipe websites I frequent and the photo I had of the ingredients.  Score!

I made this recipe to get rid of the final can of pumpkin puree I had in my pantry.  I got a little aggressive with the pumpkin purchasing in the lead up to pumpkin week last Fall and needed to use it up.  The recipe is pretty straight forward... oil and sugar are mixed together, add eggs and pumpkin, add flour, spices, salt  and baking powder, throw in some nuts or pumpkin seeds and bake it up.

This recipe makes two loaves which is pretty awesome.  You can eat one which will happen very quickly and give one away.  Or, if you're being selfish, stick the second one in the freezer and eat it too.

I think this pumpkin bread is pretty perfect.  It is super moist, has a great warm spice component and is full of pumpkin flavor.  Exactly what you want in pumpkin bread.

Spiced Pumpkin Bread
from Epicurious

Ingredients
3 cups Sugar
1 cup Vegetable or Canola Oil
3 Eggs
1 16oz. can Pumpkin Puree
3 cups All Purpose Flour
1 tsp Ground Cloves (you can also replace the cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg with 3 tsp Apple Pie or Pumpkin Pie Spice Blend)
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Nutmeg
1 tsp Baking Soda
1/2 tsp Salt
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
1 cup Pumpkin Seeds, coarsely chopped Walnuts or Pecans (optional)

Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Spray with non-stick spray and flour two loan pans.

In a large bowl, beat the oil and sugar together.  Mix in eggs and pumpkin puree.

In a medium bowl, stir together the flour, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, salt and baking powder.

Stir the flour mixture into pumpkin mixture in 2 additions. Mix in seeds or nuts, if desired.

Divide batter equally between prepared pans. Bake until toothpick  inserted into center comes out clean, about 1 hour 10 minutes. Transfer to racks and cool 10 minutes. Using sharp knife, cut around edge of loaves. Turn loaves out onto racks and cool completely.

Enjoy!
Julie

Baking Bouchon - Recipe 94: Hazelnut Streusel Spiced Caramel Chiboust

My hiatus lasted a little longer than I expected.  Stuff happened, it happens.

For those of you who remember my last post know that I spent a week in Kansas at "wife school" which was actually pretty good.  I didn't learn anything about being a wife in the sense of how to cook or clean or iron or curl my hair in the perfect 50's hairstyle but that wasn't exactly the point.  I did learn a lot about how to support Captain America in the new role he'll be taking when we get to Korea (which is happening in 3 days people - I don't know how that snuck up on me) and how to support all the families of the people working with CA.

I also learned a lot about myself.  For example...

• I took a personality test that told me I'm an extrovert (obviously, considering I can't find enough live people to talk to so I talk to all of you), I'm sensing (given that I often miss the big picture by obsessing with details, I'd say that's right), I'm feeling (my brother in laws don't call me a face faucet for no reason) and I'm judging (which has nothing to do with being judgmental and everything to do with the lists I make for everything.  Except that I'm totally judging you).  This combination of traits makes me a caregiver.  I'm dependable and warm but I'm also very sensitive and need structure in my life so that I don't completely freak out.  Maybe that's why CA makes fun of me all the time for needing a plan.
• I took another test that told me my conflict resolution style which I could have told you before I took the test is avoidance.  I hate conflict.  It's fine if you don't agree with me, just don't except me to agree with you either.  Let's talk about something else.
• The other test I took was my leadership style which it turns out avoids everything that has to do with me taking all control or giving up all control.  I like collaboration.  What do you think?

You may have forgotten this is a food blog, I did for a minute too.  I desperately need to tell you about the final recipes in the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook including this Hazelnut Streusel Spiced Caramel Chiboust which is a terrible title that tells you nothing about what it actually is unless you speak bakery.

This thing is essentially two layers.  The base layer is a Hazelnut Streusel which is a shortbread made with primarily hazelnut flour, but it has cake flour and almond flour mixed in as well.

The next layer is a Spiced Caramel Chiboust.  Chiboust is pastry cream that is lightened with whipped egg whites.  I made this a long time ago so I don't really remember how the heck I made it.  Unfortunately, the movers packed my beloved cookbook so I can't go back and read the recipe to remind me.  What I do know is that it took just about every bowl and pot in my house to make this stuff. 

I believe the pictures above show me making the spiced caramel to incorporate into the pastry cream but I can't be sure.

I'm more confident that these pictures show me finishing the pastry cream and folding in the egg whites to finish off the Spiced Caramel Chiboust which gets frozen into a nice flat circle.

Once the Chiboust is set, it is placed atop the Hazelnut Streusel and garnished with peaches.

After all that work and all the dishes I had to clean I absolutely hated this dessert.  The hazelnut streusel was fine but the chiboust was one of the weirdest things I've ever tasted.  It was like licking the bottom of a Chai latte where all the dredges of the spices are but with the consistency of flan.  I also don't understand how the peaches relate to the other flavors at all.  I hated it.  CA didn't like it either.  All he said was "this is weird."  I did not subject anyone else to this dessert, it got tossed in the trash.

This is the last recipe in the Tart section of the Bouchon Bakery Cookbook and it was not my favorite chapter.  A lot of the recipes were really complicated and time consuming to execute.  My hands down favorite was the Caramel Nut Tart.  Making it was a complete disaster, but once I executed it the result was really incredible.

I'll be back tomorrow with something that you might actually want to make.

Enjoy!
Julie