TWD: Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Weekend Cake - and a lot of catching up

I don't post, I don't post, I don't post... bad me :-(
I try to catch up...

Let's start whit the most recent one, the Brown Butter and Vanilla Bean Weekend Cake. The probably longest name of a cake I made up to now :-)

I used a special sugar I have from a friend, a "seasoned sugar". What I did not think about was, that the spice-mix included also rosemary and mint, what was not too bad for the cake but for sure dominated the vanilla... and made the cake green. Funnily, I did not even think about that as a possibility until I mixed the sugar into the butter. Big surprise, haha!
The recipe can be found in Dorie Greenspans book Baking Chez Moi, p. 6. For the results of the whole group, head over to TWD! (this is true also for the ther recipes mentioned here except the Amnesty Cookies and the Eiffel-Towers!)

As the cake was not quite like the recipe wanted it to be anyways, I decided to top the cake with a creamcheese frosting (from Dorie Greenspans "Big Bill's Carrot Cake" from Baking, from my home to yours). To avoid the cake to loose its flufiness, I split the cake and added some Black Butter, a speciality from Jersey/Channel Islands - a spread made from apple cider, licquorice and spices. That worked very well with the spices from the sugar!

I like this cake very much because it is very easy made and very very moist. Next time I'll try the classic version :-)

What I made some way back are the Granola Energy Bars (Baking Chez Moi, p. 328). I had to use maple syrup and gold syrup so they went dark brown, but the taste was good and I think only the looks differ from the recipe.

Then I made back in December the annual Amnesty Cookies, As usual, they turned out great in taste, as usual, they turned out ugly in looks. But why change a winning team ;-) The recipe can be found at David Lebovitz' page.

And I made "Rugelachs that won over France" (recipe on p. 301 in Baking chez Moi). For the Rugelachs I have to say, that they turned out really really ugly. I don't know why exactly. Rugelachs are a bit finickey to make, but  I made them several times, with different recepies from the other TWD-books, and they turned out better. But in the end Rugelachs are always great, whatever they look like. This is one of the treats I am happy to got to know trough TWD because in Vienna I never saw Rugelachs before.

As I go on writing I see that I actually made a lot the last weeks... I really forgot about it! How good to catch up!

One of my colleagues leaves us and heads over to Paris to start a great job there. She is goint to spend t least two years there with her partner and their adopted child. I am a bit jealous but most of all very happy for them!
For their farewell-party I made plain Sugar Cookies with a bit of lemon taste and used Eiffel-Tower cookie cutters. I glazed some of them and sprinkled them in red, blue, whit, the colours of the french flag. Unfortunately; I have no picture of the sprinkled ones.

Uh, and then there was the Vanilla Hazelnut Cheesecake as a rewind. (Baking with Julia, p.) Very good. Maybe not my all-time favourite cheesecake recipe, as I prefer more cheesecakes with mostly creamcheese and not so much cottage cheese. Unfortunately I used a too big form so it went very flat.  But it was very good - how can a cheesecake not be very good?

Done! Yay!

TWD. Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake

I adore cheesecakes, but am not such a huge fan of chocolate cheesecakes - maybe because I am not a big chocolate-lover in general. I always doubt that chocolate makes the sublime, wonderful taste of a cheesecake better. No need for improvement , in my view!

But I was willing to give this a try. What I do like is that is fast in the making, compared to other cheesecakes. There is no crust, so no pre-baking. Just cookie-crumbling, that's it.
Chilling is a bit longer and I doubt that leaving the cake in the fridge for more than one day (what I had to do) is good for the cookie bottom. It gets soggy.

The Chocolate Mascarpone Cheesecake is what it sounds like - a very rich, chocolatey cheesecake.
Next time, I would prefer to do the basic receipe without the chocolate part, but I am sure this is my personal trouble with chocolate ;-)

For everybody else I can just recommend to give it a try - it is fast, it is delicious, and the creamcheese/mascarpone-combo is heavenly!

For the recipe, have a look at Dorie Greenspans book on pp. 256-258 and to find out how other bakers liked the recipe, and what wonderful creations they made of it, see the "Leave your link" section on our TWD-group blog.

Update: ALL my colleagues LOVED this one. All. No exception. So, forget everything I sad about it and just do it, try it, enjoy it and ignore me chocolate-grinch :-)

TWD: Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones (and rewind: Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte)

Breakfast treats, breakfast treats, breakfast treats. This month is full of ... right: Breakfast treats! I love them. I admire them. I adore to eat them, I adore their easiness in the making, they are just perfect for me. Scones (just like biscuits) are more or less unknown in Austria, where I live, so I am never sure if I get the shape and size right. But as far as I remember from my trips to New York, scones look like triangles in the States (and more like american biscuits in England, but that's another story...)

I wasn't sure if oatmeal and nutmeg are ingredients I could fall in love with, but they match wonderfully. I made these scones with dried apricots and I am very happy I've chosen them as an extra ingredient. They make this more or less savory delight a tiny little bit sweet. And dried apricots still work perfect with cheese, so you have all options for what to eat with them still open - jam, butter, ham, cheese, whatever you like!

For my part I got to say that I like these scones best plain, or with a bit goat cheese. I know, that's not very American. But after all - I am not, so: Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones with dried apricots and goat cheese - we are going to have several dates in the future!!

For the original recipe of the Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones , go to Patricia's page Life with a Whisk - she has chosen this amazing recipe for this week's TWD. or - buy Dorie's book and have a look at page 30.

P.S.: Football season is oer now, so I don't really know what to do with my time (same problem every year - last for about, uhm, 10 days :o]). I made the Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte, from pages 240-242 - a recipe I was always wondering what it is like. It was originally due way way back in January 2008. In fact, it was the second recipe on the rotation, can you imagine? Jamie of Good Eats n' Sweet Treats did choose it. She has 136 posts labeled with "TWD" - gosh, what a great record!

This cheesecake is just wonderful! I used blueberry jam and added some fresh berries, too. Cheesecake is great anyways, but this recipe is maybe the best cheesecake I ever ate (at least, it is the best I ever made). If you haven't - go and bake it! 

Espresso Cheesecake Brownies

It's not often that I bake&blog beside the weekly Tuesdays-with-Dorie recipe, and it has become even more rarely since I changed to a new and very, very demanding (but also very, very exciting job).
Some weeks ago I bought some Philadelphia because it was an offer (I am so easy to manipulate...). So before it expires I had to make some cheesecake with it.

Doing cheesecake is not that easy where I life, because we do not have creamcheese round here. There are numerous webpages offering hints how to mix different dairy products so they come as close as possible to creamcheese. I mostly use about 3/4 Philadelphia and 1/4 curd cheese and for me that works.

I had a "TWD-free" weeke-end last week because I pre-made the scheduled recipe (the Banana Coconut Icecream Pie) already some weeks before. I love american desserts even more than french ones, and I particularily adore cheesecakes. And brownies. So this combination screamed "bake me" for aeons.
And I really loved it. The brownie-layer turned out comparatively dense, but in combination with the cheesecake-layer that was just about right. Marbeling didn't work, because I used a too big pan so I had not enough batter left, but I used a white-chocolate glazé and decorated it with some dark chocolate glazé.
I served it with a rhubarb-strawberry hotchpotch - and look at the colour combination!!

Definitely a "do me again"-recipe.

(the only downer is that many bowls and  pots are involved due to the different layers)

P.S.: The recipe can be found in Dorie Greenspan's book "Baking: From my home to yours", or on Melissa's page Life in a peanut shell, who opted for this recipe back in September 2009)

TWD: Low and Lush Chocolate Cheesecake

This week my first cheescake ever was on the schedule. Well, not the first cheesecake I ever ate, but the first I ever made. (But as I began baking muffins and easy christmas cookies about one year ago, and serious cakes only two month agos, almost every cake and tarte-type is new to me)
Again, as almost every other week, I had some problems with the ingredients, as creamcheese doesn't exist here. After some research I decided to take a bit less than half the needed amount of Philadelphia and complete the rest with with "Topfen" (or "Quark", as it is called in Germany). I guess it did work out s it should, so I will stick to this mixture in the future, if more cheesecakes should ever be on the plan.

This weeks recipe, the Low and Luscious Chocolate Cheesecake, was chosen by the Tea Lady of Tea and Scones. You may find the recipe there or, even better, on page 243 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From my home to yours.

Preparations - bringing the liquid in the oven,   

and bringing it out of the oven 

 



Inside the test cake                                                                                  And ready!!

I guess I am not too big a fan of cheesecakes. They are ok, but I don't want to take a bath in it. And I am neither a big fan of very creamy tortes, so, the combination of chocolate and cheesecake didn't craze me.
Nevertheless, I really liked the "dough", made of "graham crackers" (again, yes, you guessed it, a problem of ingredients. I took thick round wholewheat crackers that did look like they could do the job of graham crackers.
Despite the little problem that I have no idea what graham crackers could look like. But, again after some research and reading the descirption, I guess my dough was not too far away from what it was meant to be).

So, I don't think that I will do a lot of chocolate cheesecakes again, even though I have to admit that doing it was really as easy as promised and my colleagues where much more exited about it than I.
But I will for sure use the "dough" again!