Still Life, With Cats

Time for Episode Six of the Great British Baking Show, which was all about pastry. The challenges were: a dozen savory chouxnuts (choux pastry fried like a donut), baklava, or a terrine pie. By this point my sister and I were feeling a little overwhelmed by all the sweets, so we opted for the savory option, the terrine. However, because of my schedule I didn’t actually get a chance to make it until after the Episode Seven pooptastic cookies.

A terrine pie, by the way, is made in layers and wrapped in a crust, so that when it’s baked, it should hold its shape, and when sliced, you should be able to see the layers. Let’s see how that went!

We both toyed with the idea of using a hot water crust pastry dough, except from previous experience, that stuff *stinks* plus it’s kind of slimy to work with and neither of us really wanted to repeat that ‘fun’. So instead my sister delved into her cookbook collection and found a recipe for a pastry-covered meat pie that used a regular butter crust, so we both adapted that for our pies. Otherwise, I pretty much just gathered up a bunch of ingredients with a vague plan in mind, and decided to see how it would go, without any sort of recipe to follow.

Because we were using a butter pastry, that meant most of the filling actually needed to be mostly cooked ahead of time. I made a little meatloaf, mashed some potatoes, and cooked up some sweet potatoes with a bit of garlic and thyme, grabbed the peas out of the freezer, and then assembled my pie in a bread pan lined with parchment paper. Technically we were supposed to make our pie decorative, but we all know how well that turns out for me, so as a nod to that, I did try to do a pattern in the top when slicing openings for the steam to escape. An hour or so in the oven later, and ta da!

Look, a free-standing terrine pie with no leaks and no breakage! Woo!

And were there layers?

Yes! Yes there were!

Overall it turned out pretty tasty. Was it worth all the effort such that I will be making this on a regular basis? Eh, probably not, but Richard and I were quite happy to consume it for lunch for the next couple days so I call that a win.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Episode 5 of the Great British Baking Show was German week (and you would have thought the German contestant Jurgen would have dominated this one, except that he pointed out that he usually doesn’t make this sort of thing, so ah well). The challenge recipes were: two dozen German biscuits (cookies), a Prinzregententorte (which is a layered chocolate torte), and a double-tiered yeasted cake. We were very torn because we actually wanted to make all three of them, except that that was a lot of time and also a lot of cake and cookies for households that only have two people. So instead we compromised and decided to make 1 dozen cookies, and a single tier of yeasted cake.

Off to Google we went, and I chose Kardamon Plaetzchen (Cardamom cookies) dipped in chocolate (since they had to be decorated) and a Bee Sting Cake, which consists of a yeasted dough, sandwiched with a layer of pastry cream and topped with a layer of honeyed almonds.

The cookies turned out quite yummy. You can definitely taste the cardamom, which has a lovely flavor, and while I was worried the chocolate would overpower, it was a good combination.

The bee sting cake was interesting – I’m not sure I’ve done a yeasted cake before, but aside from the rising time, it wasn’t much different than any other cake recipe out there. It’s baked in a springform pan, to allow the dough to rise, since it would otherwise overflow a regular cake pan. The honeyed almonds are spread (carefully) over the top of the cake after it’s risen, before it goes into the oven, which then gives the cake a shiny (although slightly, uh…rustic look) once baked.

It felt like a lot of pastry cream, but in a way, you need the cream to cut the overwhelming sweetness of that topping.

I got both of them done within the time frame required (we just used the cake time requirement because we knew the cookies could be done during the rising time of the cake batter) and they were fun to make. Not sure I’d do the cake again – it was tasty but a little sweet for me, but the cookies could definitely make a reappearance in the future.

‘Tis the season for Holidailies.

Yay, we have moved on to Bread Week with the GBBO! I was looking forward to this week. The three options were focaccia, which we’ve made a couple times before, olive and cheese ciabatta breadsticks, which frankly sounded absolutely revolting (plus breadsticks didn’t seem like any kind of challenge), or a milk bread sculpture, which seemed like an awful lot of work. We did toy with the idea of looking back at past challenges to use one of those recipes, but then we decided, well, we might as well give Milk Bread a try, and then we started throwing around ideas for what to do with it, and to sum up, we decided we’d spiders and pumpkins, out of milk bread, and even though we weren’t planning on doing an actual sculpture, well….you’ll see how that turned out.

Milk bread is a Japanese thing, I believe, and it starts with you cooking a little bit of flour and milk together in a pan before you make the dough. The cooked flour is added to the dough, and it helps keep the resulting bread softer longer.

Anyway. Pumpkins and spiders. I used this recipe for my spiders. To make them look like spiders, I added a little black food coloring to the dough, and topped them with some chocolate craquelin (which is basically a cookie sort of thing – it’s usually seen on top of cream puffs, or on pan dulce).

The legs were made of the same dough, but rolled super and then draped over the sides of tin foil-lined mini bread pans.

Once they were cooled, I assembled them by stabbing small holes in the side of the bodies, and stuffing in one side of the legs. This was not always successful, but it worked for most of them, so I was pretty pleased. Then I finished them off with red gel blobs for eyes.

I honestly wasn’t sure how this would all work and was kind of making it up as I went along, but they turned out far better than I was expecting, so yay for that!

As for the pumpkin, originally I was going to do mini pumpkins, but then I decided to just do one giant pumpkin. I used this recipe, which I am not sure actually counts as milk bread, since it didn’t start with the cooked flour mixture, but I shall not quibble. This dough took a bit longer to rise than the other dough, which was actually a good thing since that meant I had plenty of time to form all the parts of the spiders.

I didn’t feel like I should do just a plain dough, so after its first proof, I rolled it out, brushed it with melted butter, and then sprinkled that with a mixture of finely chopped crystalized ginger (from my stash in the freezer – I make a pound of this every year and it’s *so* worth the work to have it available!), brown sugar, and some chopped walnuts. I figured it would be sort of like a giant cinnamon roll.

Here is my final tableau in all its glory.

The ‘top’ of the pumpkin is more of the chocolate craquelin – I tried to form a large chunk of it into some sort of stem, but it mostly sprawled in the oven, so…yeah. But overall, I’m pretty pleased with how this all turned out, especially considering that the contestants get to practice their showpiece bakes beforehand, and this was my one go at it. Total time spent: 4 hours and 9 minutes.

As for taste – the verdict is a very happy yum! The spiders are just basic bread rolls, although the chocolate in the topping does come through. As for my pumpkin, I was expecting it to look like a cinnamon roll, but when I cut off a piece, all the filling had literally melted into the dough, so you would never have guessed what I had done. But while it wasn’t visible, that crystalized ginger definitely came through in the flavor. Delicious!

This year for our general Baking Sisters theme, we decided to do vintage recipes, specifically pie. There are so many weird and wonderful recipes lurking out there that were once apparently very popular, so our goal is to make a few each month and see if they’re worth reviving.

This month we picked a couple recipes from a wonderful old cookbook a friend lent to my sister – The Household Searchlight Recipe Book, published by the Household Magazine of Topeka, Kansas, in 1937. The format of the book suggests that this is a collection of recipes sent in by a whole host of readers around the country. Each recipe itself is just a list of ingredients and a few short sentences on preparation – obviously a lot was assumed common knowledge by the cook. For example, the directions for the Apple Fluff pie we made this month said to pour the mixture into ‘a pastry-lined pie tin’, with no explanation of what type of crust to use, or how to make it, and then ‘Bake in hot oven (425 F) until crust is brown and filling is firm’, with no indication of how long that might actually entail.

But I digress. This month we decided we would make Apple Fluff Pie, Bran Candy (because the instant we saw that recipe we knew we *had* to try it), and molasses squares, because we were not holding out much hope that the bran candy was going to something we wanted to eat.

First up was making the pie crust, because that needed to chill before the pie could bake. Then we moved on to the the base for the Bran Candy, which is a caramel made from brown sugar, milk, water, a tiny amount of butter, and strangely, a tiny dab of baking powder. Both of us were a bit concerned because the caramel smelled a little burnt by the time we got it to the correct temperature, but ah well.

That needed to cool, so next we moved on to the molasses squares, which again comes together like a caramel, although in this case it’s got molasses and white sugar along with the water and butter. Once that came to the correct temperature, that was poured into a pan to cool as well. We were supposed to cut it into squares before it set completely but…oops.

Back to the bran candy. Once at room temperature we were then supposed to stir in the bran (it didn’t specify what form of bran, so I used bran cereal flakes because that’s what Richard found at the store), and then whip that until it reached a kneadable consistency. However, it was immediately obvious that I had cooked my caramel a little too long, as I had to pretty much chisel it out of the pan with a bench scraper, and it nearly glued my kitchen aid attachment to the bowl. I ended up stretching it by hand, more like a taffy, which did eventually allow me to incorporate all the bran cereal.

Trust me when I say that you do not want to see what this looked like *before* I did my taffy pull technique.

This was then cut into chunks, which were rolled in powdered sugar to keep them from sticking together.

Don’t those look appetizing!

Once the bran candy was done, then it was finally time to make the Apple Fluff Pie. This pie intrigued us because the ingredients are applesauce, lemon juice, cornstarch, and eggs, and it just sounded…very odd.

The eggs are separated, then all other ingredients plus the yolks are cooked together over a hot water bath ‘until smooth and thickened’. Neither of us could figure out exactly what was meant by ‘thickened’ since the mixture never got any thicker no matter how long we stirred.

Then you beat the egg whites, and fold in the egg whites, and then that goes into the oven to bake. It took all our willpower but we both resisted adding anything else, like actual flavor (cinnamon, for example) to the pie. That gets popped into the oven and then it’s baked ‘until set’. That took quite a while.

So how did all these weird and wacky recipes taste?

The bran candy has an underlying ‘cereal’ taste – I’m not sure how else to describe it except that if you have ever eaten a flaked breakfast cereal you probably can picture exactly what I am talking about. Otherwise I doubt you’d know that there’s actual bran in there. The cereal adds a bit of texture to the candy, but that’s about it. Otherwise it was better than we were anticipating, which isn’t saying much since we weren’t anticipating it to be any good at all! Fun to make, but not worth the effort of repeating.

I had expected the molasses squares to be more like a molasses caramel but they’re instead a hard molasses candy. We both thought they were pretty tasty.

And finally, the apple fluff pie.

I was hoping this would be reminiscent of an apple pie but….it’s basically like eating applesauce. Applesauce in a crust. I sprinkled my slice with a little cinnamon after the first bite, which did improve the overall experience, but then it was just cinnamon applesauce in a pie crust.

So…final verdict: a resounding ‘don’t bother’ for all three of them. They were super fun to make, even if I am going to have to clean out my pans with a chisel due to the hardness of the caramel, but let’s just say that if these were considered tasty treats back when this book was published, I’m super glad I’m not a 1930s housewife.

As for my Thingadailies challenge, well, there was lemon juice in the apple fluff pie, so I’m calling it good.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.