I run a Tidy Bakery

Qu'ils mangent de la chocolate chip brioche

2009-09-03T13:16:00.000-07:00

This is my favorite type of sweet bread. There is nothing that even comes close to it. The downside is it calls for massive amounts of butter (and don't even think about using shortening). I know it usually isn't supposed to be very sweet, but since it already has chocolate chips in it, I doubt you will serve it with cheese or cold cuts.

I'm not gonna lie to you, there is a lot of effort involved in making these. And any kind of yeast-risen baked good is only good for a day or so before turning stale. That's why a) it's not worth making less than six and b) it's best to freeze whatever dough you don't need (in plastic bags after portioning it). Let the dough ball thaw in the fridge for a day or at least overnight and then bake it. You can also freeze the baked brioches, best while they're still warm.

If you don't have any brioche molds, nobody will mind if you use a muffin tray (which is what I used to do before finding some proper molds on sale - see picture). But make sure you always skip one mold because the brioches will rise quite a bit.

250 g all purpose flour (2 cups)

70 g granulated sugar (5 tbsp)

10 g fresh yeast (1/4 cube) or 1/2 of a 7g dried yeast sachet

3 tbsp milk

200 g unsalted butter (1 3/4 sticks)

approx. 1/2 cup of chocolate chips or coarsely chopped chocolate

pinch of salt

4 small eggs

In a big bowl, combine flour with sugar. Take the butter out of the fridge and cut it in 1/2 inch cubes.

For the yeast sponge, lightly warm the milk in the microwave or on the stove for a few seconds. Heat kills yeast, so it really should only be lukewarm. Add the yeast and three tablespoons of your flour/sugar mixture. Blend with a whisk and set aside for about 30 minutes, covered with a tea towel.

After your sponge is nice and thick, add it to the flour with the salt and three of the eggs and start kneading. I find a KitchenAid sort of stand mixer works best for this, since you will have to knead for quite a while. After the ingredients are well combined, start adding the butter, little by little. Now you should keep kneading for a good 10 minutes. Use medium to high speed for that, since you should beat quite a lot of air into the dough. It will be very sticky, that’s why I really don’t recommend doing this by hand. Which of course doesn't mean you can't.

When your dough is smooth and airy, stir in the chocolate chips. I recommend doing this with a spoon so you don't squash and crumble them. The dough is soft enough for that. It feels and looks more like a cake batter than like bread dough. Try to get it into the shape of a ball, put it in a bowl and cover with a tea towel or cling. Let it double in size in a warm place for an hour or so or in the fridge overnight. Or, let it rise at room temperature first, then press out the air, and let it rise again in the fridge overnight. That way you're supposed to get the best consistency but I can't say that I notice much of a difference to just doing one of the two options. However, if you do let it rise in the fridge, the dough will be much less sticky and a lot easier to handle.

Pour the dough on a floured surface and divide into four equal parts. Set one part aside. Divide the other parts into halves again and, with your hands covered in flour, shape each of your parts into a ball. Put into greased molds and press a hole into the center of each ball with your finger. Form the rest of the dough into six equal drop-like shapes and try to squeeze them into the molds of your dough balls. If you're using a muffin pan, I probably wouldn't bother with the extra blob on top. Cover with a tea towel and let rise for another hour.

Lightly beat one egg with a pinch of salt and half a teaspoon of sugar. Brush your brioches with the egg and don't forget the creases. If you want to, sprinkle generously with coarse sugar and bake for 20-22 minutes in a preheated 180°C/355°F oven.

Yields six. Tastes best when still warm.

Lemon poppy seed pound cake (in jars)

2009-08-18T14:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve been baking a lot of cakes in jars recently. This is not only the perfect way to control your portion sizes, but it’s great for small households where a whole cake wouldn’t keep long enough until it’s eaten. Cakes in jars are also nice little gifts, especially for single friends. You can keep them in a dark and relatively cool place at least for a few weeks, probably up to several months. What’s perfect about pound cake baked this way is that you don’t have to store it in the fridge to keep it fresh. I always find that refrigerated pound cake is a bit hard and not at all fluffy, especially when eaten cold.

You can basically use any recipe to make jar cakes. The trick is to bake the batter in open canning glasses, preferably with straight edges to make sure you can get it out of the jar in one piece. Close the jars as soon as you take them out of the oven. Do not let them chill before screwing the lid back on or it won’t work. After about 10 minutes, the lids should “inflate” and you might even hear a little popping sound.

This recipe yields enough for three 250ml/1cup jars, which is hardly worth the effort. I would have liked to make more but I only had one egg left. If you plan on making 6 small cakes or 3 larger ones in 500ml/2cup jars, simply double the ingredients. Using a whole lemon for such a miniscule amount of batter might seem a little excessive, but when I eat something that’s advertised as “lemon something”, I don’t want a hint of lemon. I want it to be a lemon explosion in my mouth. If that’s not you, use half a lemon.

Of course you can use this recipe for a regular cake. I'd probably use about 4 times the ingredients for a regular bundt or gugelhupf pan.

60g soft butter (1/2 stick or 4tbsp + 1 tsp)
50g granulated sugar (3 1/2 tbsp)
1 large egg
60g cake flour (6 tbsp)
1 pinch of salt
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp poppy seeds
Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Preheat oven to 180°C or 355°F. Grease and flour the jars but try to avoid the top half of the edges.

Cream the butter with the sugar until fluffy, add the egg and beat until the mixture is smooth.

Add the flour, combined with the baking powder and the salt, the poppy seed and the lemon and stir into the mixture.

Carefully spoon into the jars. Try not to get any batter on the sides or tops of the glasses. Bake for about 25 minutes but test with a wooden skewer. When it comes out clean, the cakes are done. If you are using larger jars, it will probably take about 30-35 minutes. Screw on the tops and let cool.

London cheesecake with Oreo crust

2009-08-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

First update in FOREVER. I haven't been busy (I wish that was the case), I was just too lazy. I did bake a lot in the last few weeks and this was one of my favorites. The idea of a sour cream layer is from Nigella and her London cheesecake (from How To Be A Domestic Goddess) the custard is inspired in part by Junior's cheesecakes. I had accidentally bought low fat cream cheese, so I ended up adding the whipping cream to make up for the lack of calories.

I personally prefer to omit the vanilla, just because I don't like the combination of lemon and vanilla. You might also want add a few extra tablespoons of sugar if you have a sweet tooth. It's not a particularly sweet cheesecake, but I like that because it resonates well with the sour cream layer. Plus you have plenty of sugar in the oreo crust.

This recipe is for an 18 cm/7 inch springform pan. If you're using a regular springform pan, you would need about 150% of the ingredients to make a cake that's about equal in height.

12 oreos

30g / 2 tbsp butter

350 g cream cheese (12 oz)

50 g/ml whipping cream (little over 3 tbsp)

1/2 tbsp starch

75 g granulated sugar (1/3 cup)

3 eggs

1-2 tbsp lemon juice

1 tbsp vanilla or vanilla sugar (optional)

100 ml sour cream (little under 1/2 cup)

1-2 tbsp sugar

Preheated oven to 180°C/355°F. Crush the oreos either in the food processor or with a rolling pin in a plastic bag. If you're using the old-fashioned method, it's worth scraping off the creamy center parts of the cookies before crushing them. Just grind that in later with your fingertips. Add the melted butter and combine well, press into a springform pan and blind bake for 8-10 minutes.

Put on a kettle of water. In a large bowl, beat the cream cheese with the starch and the sugar until you have a smooth mixture. Add one egg at a time, the lemon and the vanilla and finally the cream. Make sure the batter is very smooth and not clumpy.

Line the springform pan with extra-strong and extra-large tin foil. Or I prefer to just put it in a roasting bag with the top cut off and then line it with regular tin foil to prevent the bag from slipping. In any case, you have to make sure absolutely no water can get into side the pan. Bake the cake in a hot water bath in a roasting dish or deep baking tray for roughly 45 minutes. The center of the cake should not be firm, but feel set so you can pour the sour cream on it. After you've done that, put it back in for another 10 minutes.

Set it on a cooling rack for about 10 minutes before you remove the foil and/or bag. Let it sit for about an hour before chilling it in the fridge for at least 4-5 hours. It's a pretty gooey cheesecake so you're better off leaving it in there overnight.

Mochadoodles

2009-07-21T13:25:00.000-07:00

Two cookie recipes in a row, I know. But I loved these so much that I had to share.

I thought I'd be the one who came up with this genius term for these little chocolate and coffee flavored snickerdoodles, but apparently I am not. At least none of them seem to be for the actual baked good.

This is pretty simple. Just take your snickerdoodles recipe of choice (mine is from Nigella's How To Be A Domestic Goddess) and replace some of the flour with unsweetened cocoa powder (Nigella's chocodoodles use 25 of 250g). Add a tablespoon or so (for a recipe using one egg) of instant coffee powder when you beat the egg into the butter. Proceed with the rest as usual.

Mochadoodles (front) and their snickerdoodles siblings in the back.

Chocolate chip and macademia nut cookies with maple syrup

2009-07-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

I’m not a big fan of making cookies. I usually screw them up. They’re either too hard or still raw, or undercooked and burnt at the same time, much like Susan Mayer’s mac and cheese. That’s why this is probably gonna be the only American style cookie recipe you’ll see me using from now on.

The cookies are pretty soft with crunchy edges. They’re not overly sweet, which I like cause I feel less guilty about having two or three (or four) at once. And the maple syrup gives them a bit of a complex taste that you don’t usually have in many cookies.

If you don’t have any macademia nuts at hand, just go without them and add some oatmeal, if you feel like it. Using both seems a bit over the top to me, but if that’s your thing, go ahead.

The demerara sugar I use is not the “brown sugar” usually used for cookies. Brown sugar has added molasses and is more moist, demerara sugar is simply unrefined cane sugar. Keep that in mind when you use brown sugar since you’re also using quite a bit of maple syrup. You might end up with a dough that’s too moist. Sometimes I end up adding another tablespoon or so of flour and chilling the dough a bit more cause the cookies spread too far.

250 g butter (2.2 sticks)

160 g sugar (roughly one cup) 
110 g demerara sugar (1/2 cup) 
7 tbsp. maple syrup 
1 tbsp. vanilla extract or 1 sachet of vanilla sugar 
2 eggs 50 g macadamia nuts (1/3 cup) 
250 g chocolate chips or coarsely chopped chocolate (1 1/2 cups) 
260 g all purpose flour (2 cups) 
90 g full wheat flour (2/3 cup) 
1 tsp. baking soda pinch of salt

I always cut the butter into smaller pieces, to help it soften faster. Cream the butter with the sugars, the vanilla and the syrup until fluffy. An electric handheld mixer works best for that. Add one egg at a time and blend well, but don’t overdo it. Now, with a wooden spoon or a hard spatula, fold in the flours with the salt and baking soda that you previously combined in a separate bowl. If you feel the dough is too hard, add a tablespoon of milk. If it’s too soft, add a tablespoon of flour. Fold in the chocolate and nuts and chill for about an hour.

I like to shape the dough into little balls, place them on the cookie sheet and chill that in the fridge again while I preheat the oven to 190°C/275°F. I do that with every batch, cause the dough is quite soft and I don’t want it to spread out too far while it’s baking. The cookies will take about 10 minutes, give or take a few depending on size. I prefer smaller ones cause they’re easier to store.

I can’t remember how much this recipe yields but it’s quite a bunch of cookies. Usually I just use half of it and it’s still enough for days.

Working out the sponge cake kinks

2009-07-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

Sponge cake batter can be a real bitch. While I love to watch it rise in the oven without any leavening agent (so magical!), you have to be really careful not to over or undermix the batter. I used to always get little bits of hardened flour in my cake. I think it's because the melted butter would bind some of the flour and there's no way of getting rid of these little globs with just a rubber spatula. So today, while making a swiss roll, I figured out what I think is the best method of mixing sponge cake batter (and I have no idea if this is supposed to be common knowledge and I just haven't been informed about it):

1. With a whisk, first add the flour and then the melted and cooled butter to the egg yolks.

2. With a spatula or a big wooden spoon, add one third of the egg whites to pre-fluff the better.

3. Carefully fold in the rest of the egg whites.

Charlotte Royale

2009-07-11T15:18:00.001-07:00

I got this recipe from my grandma, who always used to make this cake for my birthday and other occasions. Traditionally, charlotte royale is made with a zabaione but this recipe is a much simpler version that avoids using raw eggs. I guess you could call it a sort of non-bake cheesecake.

I know this is kind of a lot of work, but I think it’s definitely worth the effort. It looks fantastic and makes people think you slaved over it for a whole day, when it really doesn’t take much more than an hour of preparation time.

Jelly Roll:

5 eggs, separated
150 g sugar (2/3 cup)
150 g all purpose or cake flour (1 cup)
50 g butter (close to 1 stick)
some lemon zest (optional)
1/2 - 2/3 cup of jam of your choice
a few drops of lemon juice or rum

Filling:

250 ml whipping cream (1 cup)
250 g or 8 oz pack of cream cheese - preferably quark

250 ml yogurt (1 cup)
150 ml vanilla yogurt (2/3 cup)
some drops of lemon juice
sugar
Gelatin sheets

Preparing the jelly roll:

Preheat the oven to 175°C (345°F). Melt the butter and take it off the heat.

With an electric mixer, beat the egg yolks with about half of the sugar for 5 or so minutes. Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt in a clean bowl with clean whisks until about doubled in size. Slowly add the rest of the sugar and keep beating until soft peaks form.

Add the flour (sieved), the melted butter, the lemon zest and one third of the egg whites to the egg yolks and start stirring. You don’t have to be too gentle here. Now, carefully, fold in the rest of the egg whites. If you are too rough with them at this stage, the cake will fall and probably be ruined. Transfer to a sheet pan (approx. 35x30cm/14x12inch) lined with parchment paper and bake for about 15 minutes until it starts to turn slightly golden on top. If your sheet pan is smaller, just add a few minutes to the baking time.

In the meantime, mix the jam with your lemon juice or rum. Make sure it’s smooth enough to be spread easily and quickly.

When you take the cake out of the oven, immediately turn the sheet pan upside town onto a kitchen table (the long side facing you). Sprinkle some cold water on the parchment paper (that will make it easier to remove) and... exactly, remove it. Quickly spread the jam on it and start rolling. This is not an easy procedure and you have to be careful not to break the cake. The warmer the cake, the more pliable, that’s why you shouldn’t waste any time here.

Once the roll has pretty much cooled down, slice it into little discs. They should be around 1 cm (0.4 inches) thick.

Line a round bowl holding about 2 liters (70 oz or 8.5 cups) with long strips of baking parchment to avoid the cake from sticking to the bowl. Then tightly place your swiss roll slices in the pan to form the outer shell of the cake. Keep in mind you’ll need around 6 of them to form the bottom.

Now on to the filling:

Whip the cream for a few minutes with an electric mixer or KitchenAid, add the cream cheese, the yogurts and the lemon juice. Add as much sugar as you like. If you want to serve it as a dessert, use more, if it goes with coffee, use less. It’s up to you. I personally prefer a little less sugar, the jelly roll is sweet enough for me.

I always get a 20 gram pack of 12 gelatin sheets and need about 9 of them for this cake. You should read what it says on the packaging and try to use about the same amount I do. Put them in water for a few minutes, drain the water and dissolve the gelatin over low heat. Add to the cream mixture, beat very well for very short amount of time and quickly pour the filling into the bowl with the swiss roll disks before it thickens. Add the remaining disks on top and put a big plate on the whole thing. Chill in the fridge for at least 6 hours, preferably overnight.

When you’re ready to serve, simply put the plate upside down, remove the bowl and the strips of baking parchment and you’re ready to go.

Sachertorte

2009-07-05T16:56:00.000-07:00

I figured this would be a good way to start my blog cause it’s not only my favorite cake, but this is my own recipe as well. Sachertorte isn't just any old cake. It's almost an integral part of Austrian culture. Think of it as Austria's apple pie.

It is an acquired taste and you shouldn’t expect it to taste anything like the generic “chocolate cake” you’ve probably enjoyed more than once. The texture is very fluffy and light. It’s much dryer than brownies, for instance (which can be made up for with a generous heap of whipped cream on the plate). It’s also not too sweet and, surprisingly, not too chocolatey. But I think with this recipe I’ve worked out some of the kinks that some people might dislike about Sachertorte.

When I measured the flour and sugar, both were a little more than one cup so you might want to add around one extra tablespoon of each.

220 g granulated sugar (1 cup)

150 g flour (1 cup)

6 eggs, separated

130 g semi-sweet chocolate (4.6 oz)

1 tsp. cocoa

150 g butter (1 1/3 stick or 5.3 oz) on room temperature

vanilla extract or sugar

pinch of salt

apricot jam

Icing:

300 g sugar (1.4 cups)

1/8 liter water (1/2 cup)

250 g semi-sweet chocolate (8.8 oz)

Preheat oven to 175°C (350°F). Combine the flour with the cocoa and set aside. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or in the microwave and let it cool down slightly.

With an electric mixer, cream half the sugar with the butter. Add the egg yolks, one at a time and beat well. Finally add the melted chocolate. In a separate bowl with completely clean whisks, beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until doubled in size. Slowly add the rest of the sugar while you keep beating. The egg whites should form soft peaks.

With a rubber spatula or a big spoon, fold the flour into the yolky chocolate butter. Take about one third of the egg whites and stir them in as well. Now, CAREFULLY, fold in the rest of the egg whites. Transfer to a greased 9 inch (23 cm) springform pan and bake for roughly one hour. A wooden skewer stuck into the center of the cake should come out clean.

Take out of the oven and let it cool down for about 15 minutes before removing from the springform pan. We need a smooth top so keep the cake upside down. Let it cool for at least another hour before slicing it in half horizontally.

How much apricot jam you use is entirely up to you, but you probably will ned at least half a cup. Heat it up in a saucepan (don’t boil it!) and apply to the top of both cake halves as well as the sides. Set the top half on the bottom half again and let the jam cool and set for another hour.

Traditionally you’re expected to make your own icing, of course. You do this by letting 300 grams (1.4 cups) of sugar and 1/8 liter (1/2 cup) of water boil for a couple of minutes (it’s not supposed to caramelize). Let it chill for a little and add 250 grams (8.8 oz) of melted semi-sweet chocolate. If the sugar water is still too hot, the chocolate will burn. While still slightly warm, cover the cake with this icing. I caught the recipe for this icing on TV but usually I find myself to have enough with about half of the mixture.

The easier way is to get some chocolate icing at the store. Austrian stores sell icing specifically for Sachertorte but the chances of finding that anywhere else are pretty slim. It’s supposed to harden to a certain degree after a few hours and has a bit of a silky texture.

Serves at least 12 and can be stored for at least 3 days in a chilly place, but not the fridge.