something missing

i got back the smell of butter in my fingers. the exact way they smelled when i first started baking pie. i think it's the anchor butter. and the CIA recipe uses more butter than the 2:1 formula.

using a pastry blender to cut and rub the butter into the flour. for mealy pie crust, make the butter evenly small. for flaky pie crust, leave some butter in larger pieces.

ice water is added by the tablespoon and the mixture is tossed and tossed. near the end, i used my fingers to pinch and press the dough together. that's where i got the smell in my fingers again.

the CIA pie dough uses a lot of butter, and so it was very much tender. and humidity these few days is like shit, and so it was so hard to roll and fit the dough into the pan; i had to refrigerate it so many times.

blind baking the pie crust until doneness. then brushed with egg white so that a thin film waterproofs the crust.

but alas, i was making the strawberry pie from beranbaum's pie and pastry bible. yes, the book has many pie crust recipes, but i wasn't up to making those; i just wanted to go back to my first pie dough.

the first filling is a white-chocolate-cream-cheese layer, which further waterproofs the crust. the second filling was a cooked strawberry filling thickened with cornstarch: this was supposed to accentuate the taste of the fresh strawberries later.

the strawberries were so pretty, and the pie was simply stunning after the glaze was brushed onto the strawberries.

and so delicious. there's something just so satisfying about making, looking, and eating this pie.

gorgeous

i wanted ice cream. so i thought of making dorie greenspan's chocolate ganache ice cream. but then i realised that i've neglected beranbaum's pie and pastry bible for too long, so i flipped to the ice cream pies section and chose one of the ice creams to make. didn't make it into a pie though.

i chose the peanut butter ice cream, which was a dream to make. just a cooked egg custard whisked with peanut butter. it was so thick and creamy and tasty and so dangerously edible even before churning.

what to go with peanut butter ice cream? chocolate bread pudding!

i picked a dorie greenspan recipe for the chocolate custard. the bread was the very old, refrigerated, failed wassant. the warm pudding was so delicious with the ice cream!

and then i went back to the first bread i attempted. nigella's norwegian cinnamon buns! the first time i made the buns i failed so terribly because i hand-kneaded the dough. then i tried cutting the dough using a knife. it was horrible, but the bread was tasty. but that was in 2008.

so i thought, after 3 years, and knowing that bread is truly best kneaded with a mixer, i could reattempt the bread. but, the dough was really horible; it didn't come together no matter what even with a mixer. but i refrigerated it and the next day i worked it while it was cold, so i suppose that solved part of the problem.

somehow, the cinnamon sugar-butter mixture was firmer than i remembered. maybe i didn't soften the butter entirely. but i used butter handwhipped from cream, and it felt really homemade.

i love how the buns start off flat, and then during baking, the centres swell and rise up slightly so it looks like a mountainous road. i think it's because the cinnamon swirl is so rich in butter that in the hot oven the butter melts and lubricates and helps the centres to slide upwards.

so pretty, and so tasty!

in the deep

recently my oven was heated to the highest again. it creates this smell that feels so familiar, because i haven't made hearth breads in a long time.

decided to use hamelman's book again to further develop skills and test the recipes there. this one is focaccia, which starts from a ciabatta dough.i wanted onion toppings, so i cooked onions in butter first, like julia child does for her onion soup.ciabatta dough was very wet and sticky to handle. but since this was going to become focaccia, i used much olive oil to handle the dough, which made the job a lot easier.the onions became a bit too scorched, but they were still sweet. and the bread was crusty and delicious, though there was much oil at the bottom of the pan that still didn't get absorbed. so i used parchment paper to wrap and keep the bread.

on another occasion i tried to whisk a tiramisu entirely by hand. of course, the ladyfingers were store-bought.the first is the zabaglione, which is mostly yolks and sugar, whisked over a double boiler until light, and then whisked off the heat until cooled and tripled in volume.
then mascarpone is folded in. i know, it's supposed to be done with a spatula, but i was lazy to wash out another utensil. so i just did it with the whisk.the next one is the meringue. the recipe i have doesn't cook the meringue. but i whisked the whites in a double boiler, and it was much more stable and easier to whisk into a meringue than i had ever attempted.folding the meringue into the mascarpone-zabaglione. the mixture becomes very voluptuous and silky.and then the assembly, and the eating. the recipe was still too sweet. but it was nice to be eating an entirely handwhisked tiramisu.

back to hamelman, there was some biga left over from making the focaccia, and so i used that as the pate fermentee to add into a fougasse dough. if you save some old dough, you can incorporate that dough into a fresh one to improve the flavour.the fougasse is a flatbread, shaped into an oval, and then stretched into a triangle. 'leaf veins' are etched right through and the holes are spread opened. the shape was so pretty; as the dough transformed from wet to crusty it puffed slightly - oven spring.i hung the fougasse up to cool, but more because it was pretty for photo-taking. and when cut open, the insides revealed small random air bubbles - a good sign for crusty hearth breads. and as is the case with all lean crusty breads, the moment they leave the oven, their quality starts deteriorating as moisture moves from the crumb to the crust, drying out the interior and softening the exterior.