basicallybaking

[basicallybaking]

Homemade Oreos

This recipe didn't work out so well. The recipe is from Claire Saffitz (transcript in the "Food" folder). The flavor of the cookies was wonderful, especially the browned butter element, but the butter weight was too high in proportion to the other ingredients and the cookies were greasy and crumbled and broke upon picking up (see left photo) and fell apart when bitten into (right photo). I think I'd like to make these again with a more traditional shortbread proportion of ingredients (3:2:1) and 15% cocoa powder for the cookies. Alternately I would try a royal icing cut out cookie proportion, because those hold their shape really well.

Because I felt that the filling was a bit too fatty and soft I would sub shortening for the coconut oil, only melt the cocoa butter, beat it into the shortening and confectioner's sugar, and roll that out, freeze and cut, or maybe pipe it on if it seems like the consistency would allow it.

#cookie #sandwich cookie #sandwich cookies #chocolate cookie #chocolate cookies #baking #desserts #oreos #oreo #homemade oreo #oreo cookies #oreo cookie #cocoa butter #browned butter #black cocoa #cocoa powder

[basicallybaking]

Forest Floor Cupcakes and Lofthouse-style Sugar Cookies

Perfect chocolate Frosting

Edible moss from this recipe . X1 made 16 cupcakes and 5 cookies. Flavor is quite eggy, not very sweet. Microwaved 2 min. I think it would be great to dye half the batter slightly darker and marble the two batters together before microwaving. Meringue mushrooms: recipe is from Stella Parks. I made the meringues with regular untoasted sugar instead of toasted because I didn't have time to toast. Stella's instructions are great. The only changes I made are that I used an oven temp of 150F instead of 170F and baked for 15 hours. The meringues were crispy all the way through, didn't expand and didn't get any color whatsoever.

To get color on the caps I did what she suggested and sifted cocoa powder over the caps, rubbed it all over the caps with my fingers, then brushed the excess off with a pastry brush.

To attach the stems to the caps I used chocolate-flavored candy melts and broke the pointy tips of the stems off with my finger before piping the "chocolate" and attaching. making sure to let them set with the top of the cap facing down. They were so cute and honestly pretty quick to make.

#forest floor cupcakes #cupcakes #cookies #sugar cookies #chocolate #meringue #meringue mushrooms #mushroom #meringue cookie #meringue cookies #moss #edible moss #green cake #cake #baking #dessert #fairy fest

[basicallybaking]

Fairy Fest 2024 Cupcakes From left to right: cream cheese frosting with glittered wafer paper flower, rainbow buttercream with unicorn sugar topper, gold glitter, sprinkles, and chocolate frosted forest floor cupcakes (recipes and assembly in separate post).

#cupcakes #cookies #cupcake #cookie #fairy fest #unicorn #flower #wafer paper #edible moss #confectionary mushrooms #meringue mushrooms #forest floor #baking #dessert

[basicallybaking]

I made these about a week after making ravioli, with the same pasta maker. I found the dough to be very nice, although I preferred the taste and texture of the lemon egg pasta dough I used for the lemon ravioli to this dough. The differences were that the ravioli dough added lemon juice, zest, and water, while the varenyky used vegetable oil and kosher salt instead of table salt.

The fillings were also variations on one theme: the ravioli used ricotta, parm, and chives, whereas this recipe uses ricotta but adds sugar to make it pleasantly sweet, like a farmer's cheese danish center. The sour cherry and sour cream toppings are theoretically the perfect additions, with richness, tang, sweetness and acidity. Unfortunately my sour cherry jam was not tart at all; I should have added lemon juice, but I only thought of the addition after I had eaten all the pasta. I also tried to eat this with a Violife vegan sour cream made from hydrogenated vegetable oil and it was terrible; it tasted totally rancid. So, lesson, learned: use real sour cream. Another lesson learned was don't try to use 100% whole wheat flour in the dough! Not enough gluten will develop and it will not roll out or cook properly. Half whole wheat flour worked well in the ravioli, so I think half is fine.

#savory #varenyky #ukrainian #pasta #ricotta #cheese #lunch #dinner #sour cherry #preserves #sour cream #filled pasta

[basicallybaking]

Lemon Ravioli with Sage Beurre Monté

Recipe from The Ultimate Pasta Machine Cookbook by Tom Lacalamita. Images of the recipe are in the Food folder. Filling recipe: next time use 1 egg yolk instead of 1 whole egg (was very tasty, but too loose). Subbed chives for parsley in the filling and it worked well.

Pasta: I used half einkorn, half AP for the pasta, and the ravioli pieces expanded mostly along only one axis in the water, I think because the gluten only developed along the axis that was being stretched in the roller. I wasn't able to use the instructions from the book because they're for a machine that mixes the pasta dough as it extrudes the pasta, and I only had a pasta roller, but I was able to use the instructions that came with the pasta roller, namely: make a well in the dry ingredients, add all room temp wet ingredients, mix together, then knead until smooth and no longer sticky. Cover with a damp towel at room temp for a few minutes, then cut into 1/4 inch pieces and roll, beginning at the widest setting. (For ravioli strips the portions actually need to be quite large because you're making a long wide strip of dough like a lasagna, so it can be 1/4 inch thick but it has to also be long.) Roll on that setting 5-6 times, then begin decreasing opening size until desired thinness is achieved. We stopped at size 6, which worked well. I think we may have been able to go one setting thinner, to 7, with success as well. The cutting and folding instructions in the book were also not useful for us only because we actually had ravioli stamps, so we made large lasagna-like strips, dropped scant teaspoons of filling along it, brushed them with water, draped a another lasagna strip over it, pressed out the air, then used the ravioli stamps to cut out pieces and set them aside, then cooked in simmering water for 4-6 minutes. They rise to the top of the cooking water when done. Sauce: beurre monté, added chopped sage at the end of cooking. So smooth and emulsified!

Overall, the flavor was great.

#ravioli #lemon ravioli #lemon #ricotta #parmesan #pasta #savory #lunch #dinner

[basicallybaking]

Lemon Streamliner Cake

Recipe is from Vintage Cakes by Julie Richardson. Next time try lowering the baking temp to 325F, there were visible large bubbles on top and the edges rose more than the rest of the cake. The cake is wonderfully moist from almond paste. I added 3/4 tsp of lemon zest to the cake batter to make it lemony, I would add a full tsp next time and try subbing 2 tbsp of lemon juice for 2 tbsp of the buttermilk. The lemon custard is so good, very tart, tangy, yet creamy. It's a little too soft for a frosting IMO, as it fell of the sides when we placed the blood orange supremes on and also more gradually migrated down the sides of the cake in the fridge. Maybe it would be good to reduce the custard batch by 1/4, make a french meringue with the egg whites leftover from the custard, frost the top with that in a bowl shape like a pavlova, and put the custard and any fruit into the center.

#streamliner cake #cake #dessert #streamliner #vintage cake #vintage cakes #lemon #citrus #lemon custard #custard #almond #almond paste

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Really good, next time would add a little more cheese (maybe an additional 1/3 more).

#cacio e chili crisp #chili crisp #pasta #savory #lunch #dinner #parmesan

[basicallybaking]

Really nice, fast and easy to make, there are sweet versions that incorporate jam and alcohol.

#beurre monte #butter sauce #french #french cooking #butter #savory #sweet #lunch #dinner #dessert

[basicallybaking]

Lemon "Queenie" Cakes (Lemon Pudding Cakes) with IMBC Flowers and Almond Cookie Crumbs

Cake recipe is from the cookbook "Vintage Cakes" by Julie Richardson, IMBC recipe is from the course "Buttercream Flowers" at Make Fabulous Cakes.com . Almond cookies I used for the crumbs are "Goong goong's almond cookies" by Kristina Cho, from her book "Mooncakes and Milkbread."

I baked the cakes in 6oz ramekins and some ball jars and the recipe yielded 8 (three not shown here). The cakes are sharply lemony, because there is a very high proportion of lemon juice and zest in the thin batter (it's almost like a crepe batter). Additionally, because they're baked used a water bath they don't fully set on the bottom, making them partially liquid still in the bottom 1/5-1/4. That section is especially sharp and citrusy. It's wonderful!

The vanilla IMBC goes nicely with the cake, as do the almond cookie crumbs.

#lemon #cupcakes #lemon pudding cakes #lemon cake #pudding cake #queenie cakes #queenie cake #lemon queenie cakes #Italian meringue buttercream #buttercream #almond #cookies #IMBC #flowers #buttercream flowers #piping #buttercream piping #buttercream florals #florals

[basicallybaking]

Goong Goong's Almond Cookies

Recipe is by Kristina Cho, from her book "Mooncakes and Milk Bread" and can also be found here. These taste delicious but spread too much for my purposes, even when frozen before baking (third photo, they did spread less). I need to tinker with the leavening, which is all baking soda. I suspect this is part of the reason for the spread. If changing to a mixture of baking soda and powder doesn't work, I'll try reducing the sugar or egg, or changing the whole egg to just a yolk.

if none of that works we could try reducing the amount of dough from 1oz to 0.6-0.7oz and make sure to freeze before baking.

#almond #almond cookie #chinese almond cookies #chinese almond cookie #chinese #baking #dessert #cookies #cookie

[basicallybaking]

Recipe is from Sarah Kieffer. I baked some at 400 and some at 350 and preferred the 350, which baked more evenly and spread more nicely. Use the full amount of sesame oil, fine to bake right away and don't need to press down into pucks. These are 1oz balls, a .66x recipe yielded 18.5oz/18 full sized cookies. Flaky sea salt is good but not essential.

#cookies #sesame cookie #cookie #baking #dessert #sesame

[basicallybaking]

Lemon Shortbread from Great British Bake Off Everyday

Uses mandolined slices of lemon with the rind still attached. The final texture is really nice, crumbly on the bottom and top, soft and a little squishy in the center. Flavor is sweet and tart with bitter notes. I included some rind pieces that didn't have flesh attached, but I don't think that was necessary to increase gelling of the filling because it alrrady had egg and flour in it, like a lemon bar filling, so I would omit any rind pieces that don't include flesh next time. Is great warm, would be nice with ice cream. The little shortbread circles are super cute.

#lemon #lemon shortbread #shortbread #baking #dessert #citrus

[basicallybaking]

Matcha Latte cookies from NYT Cooking

From this recipe . Made without the ermine frosting. They're nice, need some color before you take them out otherwise they will be a bit underbaked. I wonder if I would be even better with almond butter instead of peanut butter? I weighed them into one ounce balls, did not press into pucks before baking.

#matcha #matcha cookie #matcha cookies #matcha latte cookies #cookie #cookies #baking #dessert #green tea

[basicallybaking]

Chilled Cucumber Soup from the Moosewood Cookbook

Very thin, more like a nice creamy cucumber juice. Very refreshing, to thicken up reduce water.

#cucumber #yogurt #cucumber soup #soup #savory #juice #lunch #dinner

[basicallybaking]

Very similar dough to rugelach, but with the addition of almond extract. Love to come apart in the oven. Seem to bake better at a lower temp (375F) rather than 400F and eat better when less browned and still pretty pale. Sweet enough IMO without the confectioner's sugar dusting. I used yuzu jam and black raspberry jam.

#kolaczki #cookie #cookies #kolaczki cookies #kolachy cookies #jam #jam cookies #baking #dessert

[basicallybaking]

Good, used half brown sugar, needs a bit of acidity, added 3/4 of a lemon's worth of lemon juice.

#apples #apple #applesauce

[basicallybaking]

Try halving the chili crisp (too strong for my taste). Used roasted beechnut mushrooms instead of the bacon.

#pasta #mushroom #parmesan #chili crisp