a tart tart tatin

tonight while casually keeping watch on the san francisco giants third victory over the texas rangers (kacie's boyfriend alan is a huge baseball fan) i lovingly attended to some tart tatin. tart tatin is a french apple pie of sorts. making this dessert involves cooking apples in butter and sugar on the stove top till the juices have begun to thicken. then its covered with blitz puff dough and baked off in the oven where the crust achieves a flaky golden brown. once out of the oven the whole thing is inverted onto a serving dish.

the initial cook on the stove top allows the apples to caramelize giving the tart its unique flavor. i threw a few dried sour cherries in this time for kicks, but in hindsight would have liked to soak them in brandy beforehand for they ended up a little chewy. they also covered up the decorative apple arrangement that i constructed while filling the pan, but overall it was a success.

madeleine face

after reading an email from my friend deniz about how she'd like to buy a madeleine mold i realized i had still yet to buy one myself. madeleines are a shell shaped dense cake like petite four. so, with some birthday cash in hand i went over to a vintage cooking supply store and made the long overdue purchase.

the next week i baked a batch of madeleines and attempted to dress them in faces with tempered chocolate. custom caricature's on cookies was an idea i had been tossing around to friends and so i decided to give it a try. detailed lines are hard to obtain with the chocolate, but maybe after a few more batches experimenting in a couple varieties of cookie i'll have it down.

boule, hooray!

my currant host friends kitchen (thank you miss vitucci) has an equisitly hot oven, perfect for bread baking. so, with my new bit of starter eager to feed and my relentless desire for carbs i went to work. after two and a half days this was my reward.

damn sierra club!

while on our past trip to yosemite my friends and I fell into a conversation with a neighboring "camper". he wasn't really camping as much as situating a small house in a predetermined spot of paved wood.

what seemed to be a pretty harmless conversation turned lip biting for the lot of us as this crusader of the outdoors went on about the inconvenience's the sierra club was having on his ability to have a lazyboy style outing in the woods. he reminisced to us about better times when trash was just thrown in a pile by some bleachers so visitors could watch the bears feed on the waste and how access to electricity was limitless. he also complained about the party pooping thunderstorms, which broke a record this year for being so continuous, that had reeked havoc on his generator.

it was all that ignorance that inspired me to sketch a comic. this one.

oh yeah, forgot. the reason he initially came over was to apologize for his barking dog who then took a giant piss on our campsite.

triangles everywhere!

lately there appears to be a lot of triangular shapes popping up in indie artwork. maybe nobody else seems to notice this trend and since i'm not providing examples this makes my argument moot, but trust me its true.

today after seeing yet another artist with colorful triangles in his illustrations i felt the urge to draw a little comic expressing my feelings on the subject.

don't paint me wrong, i too love the shape of a good isosceles or equilateral, but the image came to me, so ink to paper i went.

i stand corrected, its pita

update: i was just informed by my sister of my misspelling of pita. i was spelling it like the animal rights group. boy does that make me feel dumb, but i'm not ashamed to admit to my mistake. now back to the original post.

my friend anne recently cut me off a little of her sour starter and although i haven't gotten around to making any bread with it i have been trying to use the remnants from feeding the starter each week to economize on all that tasty fermentation.

last night i took the starter i removed to be replaced with some fresh food for my gassy friend and added it to a whole wheat pita recipe. i let the yeast feed overnight to develop more flavor and then baked it off this morning. now i just need to whip up a batch of hummus and with all this great weather we've been having in san francisco i'll have finally deceived myself into believing i'm in the mediterranean.

here is another photo of my slippers, which maybe aren't the best choice for baking in as they've begun to achieve a leopard coating of flour. it was actually quite worse before i kicked my foot on the ground to try and knock the majority of it off.

dewey's point

went on another trip to yosemite this weekend and took a hike to dewey's point. here are a few snap shots of the trek.

quick sketch...

of a photo from the net of a girl with hat before heading out the door.

 

and something was lurking in my coffee cup this morning. my guess, an omen. 

bird poop?

looks as if a feathered friend has left something on the windowsill, but in reality this was my attempt at tartine bakery's rochers. basically swiss meringue cookies. i tried to spruce them up by adding candied coffee bean pieces and cocoa. there a tad chewier then they should be, probably from baking too long, but still tasty. next time i think avoiding the hersey kiss shape would be a good idea for obvious reasons.

also, first apple pie of fall! tried a little experiment with this one using two type of crust for bottom and top. on the bottom i did a non flaky pie dough cutting the fat into the flour quite thoroughly like making a tart dough (pate brisee). then on top i used a blitz puff dough, a more mild version of puff dough used for things like turnovers or napoleons. still a lot of puff for a much weaker dough. no denying that is a flaky top.

if you didn't notice and how could you. i used my pie bird for the first time. supposedly really effective in venting covered pies. looks like it did alright this go around.