TWD: Caramel Pots de Creme

It's ridiculous how blase I've become about baking. Over the past 3-4 years, I went from someone who, while knowing the general steps of baking, was tentative in them to someone who just whips up cakes and cookies and pots de creme at the drop of a hat. Crazy, especially when you realize that for many of my first blog posts, I had moral support in the kitchen. Friends who I'd drag over to my teeny tiny Wisconsin apartment so that if something went wrong, I had help to fix it. Ignore the fact that most of them weren't actually adept enough in the kitchen to truly help. Seriously, one was straight out of the generation of canned soup + meat + noodles = dinner. Cheese counted for bonus points. How in the world was she supposed to help me if I burnt caramel? Nonetheless, this particular friend stood by me and chatted while I put together a Black and White Chocolate Cake - my very first Tuesday with Dorie dessert. She was also around (and actually helped!) when I made baked doughnuts for the first time.

But now? Well, to illustrate the point, I'll have to explain my thought process about this week's pick, caramel pots de creme. First, I actually know what pots de creme are. I also knew that we were flying to Nebraska mid-day last Friday, returning home around midnight last night. So I need to make these, oh, sometime very very soon. Especially given the fact that I had lost quite a bit of baking time thanks to the trip to Sacramento. So Thursday night, right after dinner, I pulled out the book. Two eggs. Five egg yolks. Sugar, milk, cream. Combine that with my distinct meh-ness about creamy desserts, and you have a solution that I wouldn't have tried in a million years just three years ago. I one-sixthed the dessert. Used one yolk, caramelized a mere tablespoon of sugar, and generally just winged it. Expecting a quicker-than-instructed bake time (my oven runs hot), I pulled them out at 20 minutes and let them rest for ten. Jiggly. Back in the oven they went, now for another 10 minutes. Another ten minute rest, and we were good to go. 45 minutes from start to finish, and I had a dessert that would have given me serious anxiety not too long ago. Crazy, right?

It makes me wonder about all those people who say they can't cook, or bake, or do anything in the kitchen other than open a box of mac & cheese or a can of soup. What if they just made one new thing, every week? If things were chosen that were easy or had good instructions, and ingredients that were actually familiar - would people be a bit less scared of the kitchen, and of cooking? I'd like to think so.

Last Week: Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones
Next Week: Blueberry Brown Sugar Plain Cake (oh, be still my heart... we're already getting local berries here!)

TWD: Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones

Scones make me happy. Whether they're flaky or moist, light or substantial, speckled with fruit or nubbly with oats - scones are a good thing. These tend towards the moist, substantial, and nubbly ends of the spectrum, all of which remind me of scones I got in a gift box from my dad a few years ago. One thing about my dad? He prioritizes good food. Whenever we were having a hard time during college, work, or grad school, his solution was always a gift box from Zingerman's. My sister mostly got the Weekender, I generally got a box of assorted scones. Hers always seemed interesting, full of cookies and coffeecake and peanuts and bread, but I treasured my scones. The flavors have changed since the last time, but at that point they were oatmeal cinnamon, raisin, and ginger. And while my favorite was always the ginger (studding anything with candied ginger is a wonderful idea), I never said no to the oatmeal scones. They were for mornings when I wanted a heftier breakfast, not just a dainty bite to eat with my morning coffee or tea.

 
These seem like an upgraded version of those scones though. Trading in nutmeg for the cinnamon, upping the oatmeal, and getting to eat them warm from the oven makes them a very very good thing. Which is a relief, since my dad has stopped sending me Zingerman's boxes, and I only go on the site so that I can put together a random assortment of things for my sister when she's stressed. Nothing like getting a package of interesting cheese, a loaf of bread, pickled raisins, and Camargue red rice to make for a nice pick-me-up, right? Thank goodness for my family, that last statement is actually true. W're a bit food-obsessed. Seriously, the best part of any holiday together is the all-day cooking and baking that occurs on the day-of. For weeks before, we plan out menus, finding and proposing and discarding all sorts via phone or email until we finally figure out what we'll be making. And while my dad generally includes mashed potatoes because they're my favorite, everything else tends to be brand new. I can't imagine what holidays would have been like without the annual event of flipping through every holiday Gourmet issue since 1970, without the craziness of fitting three people all prepping and chopping and stirring into our not-so-massive kitchen.

 
Maybe that explains why I have such strong associations with different foods. Whenever J and I make pasta, I reminisce about how I was the "official pasta taste tester" of the family. Seriously, my dad would call me into the kitchen to have me check pasta doneness, and I was considered the ultimate authority on it. Mashed potatoes were seasoned until I had deemed them just right. And I don't remember a time when I wasn't tasked with chopping up or peeling something for dinner. As much as I might have complained while growing up about having to do vegetable prep, now the situation is completely reversed. After last week's trip to Sacramento with its consequent 6 day hiatus from the kitchen, it didn't take much before I had to get back to chopping and cooking, mixing and baking. And while J made fun of me for my ability to commandeer the entire kitchen in 5 seconds flat, I wouldn't have it any other way.

 
And for those wondering, Tuesdays with Dorie members don't post the recipes for anything that we bake as a group. The host for each week puts the recipe up - check on the TWD site for who is hosting any particular week if you'd like the recipe.

Last Week: Maple Cornmeal Biscuits
Next Week: Caramel Pots de Creme

TWD: Maple Cornmeal Biscuits

I'm currently at a data workshop in Sacramento, CA, where so much has already gone wrong and I've been so low on sleep that the only words that would conceivably come out of my mouth right now are not ones that you will want to hear. We'll just say that, in addition to workshop-related issues and sleep-deprivation issues, the internet in this hotel is probably the slowest thing I've ever experienced. But I was prepared! I had uploaded the photos into a draft post this past weekend before leaving, so that all I'd have to do is type up a post, schedule it to go up, and call it good. Except that the photos deleted themselves while I was writing, and of course this oh-so-efficient Blogger platform auto-saves every 2.3582 seconds. And it saved. Without the inexplicably-deleted pictures. So awesome, right?

 
If nothing else, I am so glad I fit in baking these this past weekend. A few people had instilled reservations in me about baking them - plain cornbread would be better, too gritty, not enough maple flavor, not biscuit-y enough, almost scone-like, too dense... Luckily, I forged on, for no better reason than that they would take 5 minutes to mix up and would be a great snack for J while I was gone. Because people? These biscuits were awesome. They were faintly sweet from maple syrup and cornmeal, just gritty enough from the cornmeal to give textural interest, and a wonderfully hearty drop biscuit. So good.

So people? Bake these. And don't stay at the Hawthorn Suites in Sacramento.

Last Week: Brown Sugar Bundt Cake
Next Week: Oatmeal Nutmeg Scones

TWD: Brown Sugar Bundt Cake

For the past 8ish months, I have been doing hard core analytical chemistry. Analyzing samples of particulates collected from that torturous six weeks in Bakersfield. Analytical chemistry is fun, and I totally geek out on it, especially when it takes this number of syllables just to describe the technique: negative-ion high-performance liquid chromatography / electrospray quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Or, well, (-) LC/ESI-Q-TOF MS, which is also sexy in a chem dork kind of way. Oh yes, chemistry is sexy. Don't let anyone tell you differently. Also, I'd like to know what weird searches just got redirected to my blog thanks to the last few sentences. Whoops.

 
I've been one of the major users of this particular instrument, and have even thrown my name in the hat as a potential namer of the LC/MS. Because these suckers have personalities. They get into snits - the nasty ones that put you back two months in your research. And unless you talk nicely to them, they'll inexplicably decide to do weird things like make your reference compounds disappear or your pump back pressure oscillate. Ornery is a good word to describe them. But like most other inanimate objects, they do seem to listen and understand if I do the same. So even though it makes the others in the lab look at me funny, I chat with the LC as I get it going, pat it when it does what I want, and check in on it every couple hours when it runs my samples. I think it appreciates the attention, you know?

 
So when the lab's power supply had to be replaced, which caused a turbo pump in the MS to freeze up, which pushed out when I could get my data to a scant week before I needed it for a poster presentation? I was not happy with little mister LC/MS. But I was happy with the lab staff, who busted ass to get a refurbished pump into the instrument as quickly as possible and then were perfectly fine with me commandeering an entire week on it once it was back up. These are good people. More than just good people. They were, in my opinion, 150% deserving of cake. And balloons. And confetti. Probably beer too, but I'm a bit wary of bringing alcohol into academic buildings (although the bottle of champagne I saw in the fridge just last week was gutsy of someone).

In the interest of making this a more accessible cake to the masses, I didn't put pears and prunes in it - instead, pecans and hunks of chocolate stud this bundt. Because really, who wouldn't want a huge, cake-shaped chocolate chip cookie??

 
Last Week: Mocha Marbled Loaf Cake
Next Week: Maple Cornmeal Biscuits

TWD: Mocha Marbled Loaf Cake

I have to think that in the 3+ years I've been writing here, I've mentioned how much I dislike peppermint in baked goods. Or really, anything minty other than toothpaste and gum and mouthwash. And god help us if those aren't minty - that'd just be gross. But grosser? Mint. In baked goods. Seriously, mint is a cool flavor, while baked goods are warm and comforting and should not be minty. Which is really all just a lead-up to the fact that this is not the first time I've made this marbled loaf cake. I made it probably 3 or so years ago, at J's behest. J likes mint. In everything. Mint chocolate chip ice cream, minty cake, minty cookies, minty fudge, yada yada yada. My opinion? Blech. But when I get a baking request, I just have to roll with it, right? Let's just say though that the entire cake went back with J to Madison so that it could stop offending my sensibilities.

 
Which just meant that when this cake was chosen, I immediately knew that I needed to do a different variation. And one that I would love. Coffee. Coffeecoffeecoffee. And chocolate, of course, because chocolate makes everything better. Chocolate + coffee + vanilla + cake = love, right? And it's even better when it's in a cutely shaped vintage loaf pan courtesy of Nancy. It was also incredibly fun to pre-slice everything and see how the marbling had turned out. I went with the default marbling method of plopping little blobs of batter alternately around the pan. A couple squiggles, and done! Off the loaf went into J's work, where he looked like a rockstar for bringing cake in on the day of someone's retirement party. Something tells me he didn't let them know it was a combination of purest chance, TWD, and me.....

 
Last Week: Cornmeal Shortbread
Next Week: Brown Sugar Bundt Cake