New Pans

Sur La Table has a sale going on, so, it being a favorite store of mine, I swung by. Turns out they finally had the cheesecake pan I've been trying to find (and it was on sale!) as well as an inexpensive tube pan. After ogling their giant Le Cruset section, I managed to get out of there for under $50, which I considered impressive. Look forward to cakes in the near future.

Elderflower Mint Julep

No, this isn't baked. It's a drink. I'll include a few drink recipes from time to time as well, as I think mixology is as interesting as baking (and far less time consuming). Here is a basic mint julep with the addition of St. Germain elderflower liqueur. I also made a mint-infused syrup to heighten the mint flavor and remove the need to muddle the mint leaves.

To make the mint simple syrup...

Cardamom & Clove Meringues

After the rosemary cornmeal cake I made last night, I had some leftover egg whites. Not wanting to waste them, I decided to try my hand at meringue cookies. A quick search surprised me with more than one recipe that contained cardamom, one of my new favorite spices. Reading through the comments of these recipes lead me to believe that the cardamom wasn't exactly a perfect match, so I decided to round out the flavoring with some ground cloves. All the recipes seemed essentially the same: whip the crap out of the egg whites and gradually add the sugar and spices when soft peaks begin to form, then continue whipping until hard peaks form. It was about after 5 minutes of standing there holding my hand mixer that I began to long for that Kitchenaid of my dreams. I didn't have high expectations since this was my first time attempting meringues and am intimidated by egg whites to begin with, so I'm pretty sure I didn't use proper technique at all. In any event, I could never get true stiff peaks to form, so I waited as long as my patience allowed, then just stuffed the batter into a pastry bag and piped as many cookies as would fit on my pans.

I clearly need more than two pans. I ended up throwing about a third of the batter out...

Rosemary cornmeal cake with rosemary balsamic syrup

As some may know, I'll put rosemary in just about anything. When I found this recipe I thought it would be right up my alley. Nope. Cornmeal does not a perfect cake make. The flavor is akin to sweetened cornbread (which is essentially all it is). The texture was pretty good. Nice and dense and spongy. The balsamic syrup just made it taste like an appetizer from Macaroni Grill.

Here is the cake in the pan after I cut out a couple slices. The balsamic syrup is in the carafe to the left.

Here is the plated version dusted with powdered sugar.

While I enjoyed the rosemary, which was very prominent, the rest of the cake was a mismatch of flavors that I wouldn't want to serve at the end of a meal. Dusted with enough powdered sugar it's not terrible, but I won't be making this again. I should have known better than to trust Giada de Laurentis.

preheating the oven

For over a decade now I've been teaching myself how to bake. As my quest for pastry excellence continues, I thought I'd share my adventures and mishaps visually and maybe entice some of you to share them with me in a more corporeal sense. I'll do my best to take pictures and describe tastes and smells (at least until they develop internet smell-o-vision.)