busy, busy, busy! or am i slow?

well, its been busy for me as i've been drusin around this last half of nov. drusin is a term coined by my friends anne and alan for when someone is moving quite slow. a prime example of this is me, hence the play on words.

anyway, its been a while and i've done a lot of baking recently, so i thought i would go ahead and post a bunch of photos of things i've worked on.

these first few photos are of two german chocolate cakes i made for my friend martin's 40th birthday. i used a recipe i took from david lebovitz's blog which you can find here. as you may have guessed he like to bike, so i spruced up the top of one of the cakes with a few chocolate cycles. 

 

 

after making these two monsters you think i would have stopped for a bit, but i kept chugging along right through thanksgiving. unfortunately i have to wrangle up some shots of the pies i made for the holidays, but there is plenty of other items to display.

as i posted before i'd been on an effort to perfect my skills of baking french macarons, those tricky french sandwich cookies made from no more then egg whites, almond meal and sugar. i found a pretty good formula on an aussies blog syrup and tang. it tells you how much of each ingredient to use based off the amount of egg whites you have; a baker percentage for macarons.

well, they've been getting better each bake off and i think i hit my stride on thanksgiving, so lets see if i can keep it up. along with macarons i've been exploring another sandwich cookie with a more humble background, the whoopie pie. my first attempt was actually using a recipe i found from a british newspaper. i guess the craze has jumped the pond and landed in london town. europeans scale there ingredients by weight, making things more exact, which is why i clung to this recipe.

finally i'll leave you with these last two photos, one being a slice of a caramel chocolate tart from the book the sweet life by kate zuckerman and a loaf of bread produced in the fashion of chad robertson of tartine bakery fame. I have to thank my friend anne for jotting down the  bread formula the same day i was demanded to make the chocolate tart in order to cure a group of ladies from sweet depletion.

come back in the following weeks to see even more treats as i'm sure the holidays will spark a flurry of baking, maybe even a few drawings and other surprises too.

little chocolate bombs

i've been trying to produce a nice chocolate french macaron and its been tricky. i initially attempted a recipe from my school text book, but although the taste was good the cookies were in poor form. so i did some online research and found david lebovitz had a promising recipe. he admits to having equal difficulty making chocolate macarons, which while questioning some french chefs was told are the most temperamental. in the final variation of his recipe he recommends baking the cookies as soon as there piped. this practice is contradicting to what i was taught and of most formulas i've read. typically you let the macarons rest till the outside has formed a shell that is dry to the touch. the forming of this shell appears to help the little guys create their distinctive foot.

i let mine rest a few hours to develop the shell, which appeared to work out just fine, but as they came from the oven the desirable smooth caps deformed. i'm not sure what caused this, but i decided to remedy the look by dressing them up in cookie makeup (tempered chocolate). the extra chocolate in addition to the ganache filling turned the macarons into some potent bites. later that evening my friends cleared the lot of them from the kitchen with exclamations and moans of appreciation, so a success after all.

in an attempt to make my images of food a bit more dynamic i've decided to commit to taking shots in more interesting locations. what macarons and bonsai trees have in common i can't say, but its better then looking at another yearbook photo of food in front of a kitchen table backdrop.