A wonderful bread for winter, hearty, and filling this oat bread was pretty easy to make. It was also (by bread standards at least) pretty quick to make. 
Trust me this will stink up your entire house. It did ours. I adore sauerkraut - I don't eat as is (ie plain) but chop up some onion, soften that in butter, then add the sauerkraut, some juniper berries and some caraway seeds and I'm done. 
From my in laws this year I received a wonderful bundt pan. I adore the angles on it. We went out and visited them last week but I didn't manage to make a bundt cake for them using the pan, So here is one I made later! It is a pumpkin bundt cake, made using a whole smallish pumpkin (a common sugar pumpkin was cut in half, seeds removed, skin removed, cut into small peices and placed on a baking tray. A little water was added, and then it was all covered in aluminium foil and baked at 375F until soft. Finally it was all mashed in a blender until smooth). I used the recipe from the blog "From Scratch" (http://foodpluspolitics.com/2007/10/31/pumpkin-bundt-cake/) with a few little changes:Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a Bundt pan.
In a large bowl, whisk the 3 eggs until blended. Add pumpkin and oil. Whisk until smooth.
Add flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and spices. Mix well. Stir in raisins (and nuts, if using).
Pour into pan, bake 65 - 75 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.
Let cool on a rack for 10 minutes. Remove from pan, let cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar before serving.
These are xmas to me. Forget everything else. We didn't really have a traditional dinner at our place when I was a kid for xmas, we'd have some great tasting stuff usually a roladen or sauerbraten or if it was really hot we'd have schnitzel and a potato salad. I did love going to my Nana and Opa's place and consuming vaste amounts of food, but most of all you'd catch me in a corner with my brothers eating these guys. 
Not the prettiest picture really but some seriously tasty ice cream. I made a simple custard base for the ice cream and then infused the cream with my favorite tea of the moment ([please excuse the product placement] Harney & Son's "Paris" tea). It's a black tea with a bit of Earl Gray (bergamont) and vanilla. A totally good, strong but not overwhelming dark tea. 
I heard that this isn't the way a lot of people eat their rice pudding, it really isn't that sweet, most of the good stuff is placed on top rather then integrated but this is the rice pudding I grew up with. I adore this.
These are yet another Dorie Greenspan cookie. They are wonderful, they have no eggs in them, they are chocolaty and they have a secrete ingredient that makes them even better. Salt. Specifically Fleur de sel. It adds a slight grittyness (much like Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese in a weird way), and an amzing uplift to the cookie that is really tasty. The reviews I recieved were all positive for these babies so although they aren't pretty cookies they're seriously tasty cookies. Tasty far outweighs pretty in my book! 
I guess I grew up differently, because at around this time of the year I start to go insane. I think it's the music, the constant repetitive cheerful voices, the people telling me (very happily I might add) about how great it is to have snow (and well, yeah I have to agree there having had xmas in Australia in summer for the majority of my life), and about the virtues of Santa. Anyway, despite my bah humbug ways I decided to make Stollen with two buds from baking class, Sarah and Jamie. It was quite an undertaking and it taught us to read recipes before we decide to make them. This is specifically in relation to yeast and time.
Wow, it's pretty jam packed. This bread is a 'quick bread' meaning it doesn't require a starter dough made the night before. However, I did start it around 9 am and finished it at around 2pm... so I guess quick bread isn't really the right name for it. However, it was worth it.
I started to peel the pears and noticed they were soft - no biggy right? I can put them in something and baked them and all will be well. Then I cut them in half and they were seriously brown. So out they went. I panicked, this was a dessert for someone who was coming over to have dinner with us. I really didn't have much at home to use in the way of fruit (which I adore using). But on the weekend I had bought a couple of Asian Pears (Nashi Pears for the Aussies).
Something simple and quick is what I've been craving to make. Nothing fancy and complex. These are just simply choc chip (bitter sweet choc was used) with a bit of vanilla extract, some walnuts and a whole heap of butter. Another wonderful Dorie Greenspan recipe. I have to admit I love Dorie. Her recipes are simple, straight forward. However they aren't simple in their taste. They often have an adventurous side to them for instance incorporating unusual spices. And, the best part is, her recipes usually work and taste amazing.
The last rotation at school was breads. It was mostly us, the first quarter getting things ready for the next day (weighing various amounts of flour, salt and fresh yeast most of the time). However, some days we did some quirky things. Like these. Squirrels? Weird yes, kinda weirdly cool - I think so. We have a book at school that basically details how to mold bread dough into various forms - masks, wheat stalks, rabbits, chickens, snakes, crocodiles, teddy bears and yes squirrels.
I love to sneak a vegetable into a sweet treat. I guess it's the deceptive part of me; attempting to make something that usually isn't (or at least shouldn't) be healthy into something that is well, a tad more healthy.
I was talking to a friend and fellow baker Sarah during the week and she was telling me about her rotation on doughs. She said that the only pastry she ever bought (that she made) was a galette with chard, onions, balsamic, apple and blue cheese. I thought I'd give it a burl at home. It was a magnificent combo. The crust is a simple one - I just got lazy. Originally I was going to make some snazzy yeasty thing, but then I couldn't be bothered and so I made a crust without yeast, made some fancy crusts. I then simply washed, chopped and sauteed some gorgeous chard with some red onion, added a ton of balsamic vinegar. I placed thinly slice granny smith apples on the base, placed the chard on top, then the blue cheese. Finally I put on some pine nuts, and then baked it until the crust was a smidge brown. That's it, so simple, and so very tasty!
Earlier this year Josh and I went to New York. It was here that I first tried a pignoli (which is the plural of pignolo meaning pine nut). I remember going into this Italian bakery and looking at a wall of cookies, most of which I hadn't encountered before. I decided to try the one's that appeared most foreign - the pignoli was amongst these. They are delicious, soft and chewy, weirdly dense although the texture is light (I think it's because when you bite into a pignoli the air escapes and you create a dense texture due to the sugar and egg whites mashing together). I love the pine nuts, they add a meaty note to the whole thing pretty tasty all round, and really easy to make. Another egg white left over recipe. 
I have absolutely no skills in piping, seriously. I have a bit of a shake, and I get nervous at the idea of something being permanently attached to something. But I decided to try and make some of my left over pate sucree into snow men - simple one's without too much glitter and glam. 
This is an Australian treat (or New Zealand treat depending on who you beleive although of course I always was brought up to believe it was Aussie) named after the ballerina Anna Pavlova.
A simple pate sucre filled with a brown butter filling (simple butter browned until it has a hazelnut smell to it, with eggs, sugar a bit of flour and I added a bit more frangelico [hazelnut liquor] to flavor it a smidge). It was alright, I need to figure out how to make the brown butter taste like the flavor I add to it - I really wanted a hazelnut flavor to it, but besides adding roasted ground hazelnuts, I'm not sure how to do it.
During the week we made some gorgeous puff pastry galletts with a type of apple called Rome Apples. They are a hard batch to get right, they are tasty cooked, not so tasty raw. But the best thing was they had this insanely pink flesh - totally amazing. What is so hard is to find apples that have that pink color in their flesh, as it seems that it's hit or miss - you can't tell from looking at the skin of a Rome what color the flesh will be. However, most of the apples used had a very white flesh with pink veins running throughout the flesh, which at the very least adds interesting color variations.
For more info check out: http://www.stemilt.com/fruit/apples/Pages/Rome.aspx
These are from the most recent issue of Bon Appetit (December 2008). I just happen to have all the ingredients hanging about so I thought that I'd give them a go. They were an interesting flavor, sort of chocolately, mulled wine, hazelnutty. Pretty good actually - interesting, pretty easy to make. Great gifts for Chissy!
This is my first time attempting to make the iconic dessert that is creme brulee. I have to admit I'm a complete novice, I think I've had creme brulee maybe twice in my life, but those two times I really did like it. I think I was afraid to make it because I didn't have a blowtorch, I really had no idea you could make it using your oven. And so, this is what I did. It was tasty, crazy decadent but pretty damn good.
A mentioned in a previous post - I usually have left over pate sucre. I decided to use some the the sucre to make some mini-experimental tarts. I didn't grow up on pumpkin pie, in fact I've never had it before, so I'm not sure what it should taste like. But I was fascinated by the idea of having an essentially savory food inside something that is usually sweet. 
This is one of those recipes I'd been eyeing off for a while, but hadn't yet go around to trying tit. These were doughy (as opposed to bready) rolls infused with onion.
I have a confession to make, I always have left over sucre when I make a tart. Always, so this week I made a concerted effort to reduce my waste in that department. I did make cookies for the past two weeks (seriously 2 weeks of creaming and refrigerating) so I was feeling rather cocky on the cooky front. 
This is such a simple tart to make, especially if you have apples and almonds hanging around. Frangipani is a smooth paste made from almonds (preferably blanched - although as you can see I got lazy and left the skins on half the almonds), sugar and eggs. You can add some flavoring in there in the form of almond extract or vanilla extract, but basically frangipani is sugar, almonds and eggs. 
I've made this cake before (http://rhid-baked.blogspot.com/2007/08/carrot-cake.html) but this time I used colored carrots (yellow and orange and a sort of in-between shade). A really nice cake. Moist, nutty and a little spicy. I really like carrot cake due to it's moisture retention. If I were to make this cake again I would maybe times the cream cheese icing recipe by 1.5 as the icing was a little on the skinny side. 
