diary
chocolate, saturated
Drenched. Dewy. Vivid.
My solid sheet of brownies cooling on the kitchen counter top is all of the above: Another day, another chocolate-intense experience.
Life is sweet, and riddled with choices. Brownies, plain? Brownies, nut-riddled? Brownies, with chips? Brownies, without chips? Brownies, frosted?
To arrive at a pan of goodness, I combined a number of chocolate-based items, backed up by the usual brownie-friendly ingredients. The result? Chewy-fudgy brownies broadcasting the flavor of chocolate. Interestingly enough, I defied conventional wisdom (and my own baking rule–oh well!) a bit, and used a certain amount of melted semisweet chocolate chips in the batter. Both the formula and construction that allow the chips to hold their shape actually contributed, in part, to its dense, pull-y texture. A stir-in of extra chips adds little melty pockets of chocolate when the confection is enjoyed freshly baked.
For those devoted to chocolate configured into a raging bar, my deluxe brownies are for you.
not exactly traditional
My baking agenda is, oftentimes, set by a craving–like a desire I had recently for gingerbread. Somehow, I was searching for something bready with the overarching flavors present in gingerbread (which is really a bread anyway but most people think of it as cake).
So I was intent on having a warm ginger quick bread on my mid-morning plate, though not an item in the department of scones or pancakes. It was a fairly lazy Sunday and I was inspired (very hungry, actually, having just returned from a two-mile speed walk and, well, not that lazy) to get this treat going quickly, in a spice-tastic way. Don’t you just love how urgency drives right past more complex recipes and leaves them in the dust?
In a twinkle, white whole wheat flour, leavenings, sugar, and the indispensable spices appeared in a large mixing bowl, and buttermilk, eggs, oil, and molasses were whisked up in another bowl. Once combined, the batter–moderately thick and scented–was ready to spoon between the heated grids of a waffler. Oddly enough, the key to creating a delicate, somewhat cakelike gingerbread waffle, is to leave small lumps in the batter, for over-mixing the wet and dry ingredients toughens the quick bread. There’s a fine line between mixing the components thoroughly so that all large and small pockets of dry ingredients are absorbed and combining the elements too vigorously.
A few (leftover) roasted pear segments tossed in a tablespoon of warmed maple syrup was all I needed to ornament this lovely waffle, though having it simply with a pat of butter or sideswipe of jam would have been just fine with me.
Postscript: Oh, visitors of baking style diary, thank you for chiming in to declare the wonderfulness of these waffles, and for offering suggestions–herewith–for accompanying the freshly griddled waffles. Here are some of your thoughts: lemon curd; lemon custard sauce; lemon butter; ginger butter; maple butter; maple walnuts; and maple yogurt.
sweet and savory baking notes
delicious bites of baking information
Feb 22 -
baking style diary Recipe Tracker: My breakfast oat bran does, indeed, make for a tasty breakfast. Thank you for your feedback, visitors of baking style diary.
Feb 21 -
Baking Style Tracker: To reply to even more visitors of baking style diary baking the chocolate chip cookies, wild ones, from Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes (reviewed in Publishers Weekly): Yes, you can refrigerate the dough overnight (enclosed in food-grade plastic wrap); increase the baking time by 1 to 2 minutes. Cookies baked using refrigerated dough will be slightly thicker.
Feb 20 -
Baking by Flavor Tracker: Today is the tenth birthday of Baking by Flavor, celebrated by the publication of the trade paperback (originally published in hardcover in 2002)!
i have a baking question
ask Lisa a baking-related question
Q:
What was the most difficult recipe to develop in Baking Style?
A:
Every single recipe In Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes has a story attached, oftentimes relating to its development. Over the years, a handful of recipes challenged me and presented sticky problems to be worked through for creating a baked good that sang with flavor and charmed with texture. A yeast dough became “over-anxious” and burst through its wrappings; a drop cookie dough puddled–mercilessly–on the baking pan; a tray of scones rose beautifully then flattened mysteriously. Such is the life of a baker. The recipe that tormented me until I got it right was almond macaroons in an embrace of flavor and texture (page 254): My goal was to arrive at moist, flavorful, and plump cookies–it took some some to achieve all three charateristics in one dough.
Q:
Many readers have asked me about the details of the design for Baking Style. I presented this forum to my publisher (Natalie Chapman) and editor (Pamela Chirls) for commenting on the particulars of my new cookbook. Please welcome both experts.
A:
From Natalie Chapman: “Baking Style is a voluptuous book. The design is elegant, distinctive, stylish, and very pink. Curlicued rules and candy-stripes on the edges of text pages accentuate the allure of the recipes and photographs while complementing the cleanness of the design. The splendid full-page photographs show Lisa’s cookies, cakes, breads, muffins, and other baked creations aglow against a variety of pink and patterned backgrounds, and the endpapers dazzle the reader with eighty thumbnail-sized photographs of baking-related equipment and ingredients. The abundance of the interior is perfectly contained within a cover that’s at once understated and sensual. Unjacketed, printed on linen-textured material, the cover makes use of the same cursive but clean lines in the interior and adds some shimmer with silver metallic ink. The background color is, of course, a deep, almost shocking, pink. The overall effect is at once substantial and intimate, as only a printed book can be.” From Pam Chirls: “From pink to purple, a rich range of textures and tones became the showcase for Lisa Yockelson’s collection of cakes, cookies, and breads in Baking Style. Along with 80 four-color photographs of ingredients and equipment from Lisa’s pantry and cupboards printed on the book’s endpapers, the cover was designed to make a quiet statement of elegance, borrowing the fuchsia color, the graphic pattern, and the strong typography from the interior. The title is part of a creative seal, promising a personal baking journey for the reader.”
about the author
Lisa Yockelson is a baking journalist and the two-time award-winning author of Baking by Flavor and ChocolateChocolate. Her new baking cookbook, Baking Style: Art, Craft, Recipes, was recently published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Baking by Flavor has been released in a beautiful paperback edition, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the book’s publication.
book report
read about noteworthy cookbooks
Brittles, Barks, & Bonbons: Delicious Recipes for Quick and Easy Candies, by Charity Ferreira (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008), $16.95
Two recipes, one for candied citrus peel (page 81) and the other for marzipan-filled dates (page 89), offered in Brittles, Barks, & Bonbons: Delicious Recipes for Quick and Easy Candies persuaded me to sneak away–briefly–from my list of to-bake recipes and make good use of a heap of citrus peel and small container of fresh dates sitting on the counter top. This was a sweet, inviting, and welcome sidestep from my usual stir-around of batters and doughs.
Candy-making can be a challenging kitchen maneuver, what with the vagaries of time and atmospheric humidity scrambling the recipe–and skewing any thoughts of initial success. Home cooks not set up for complex candy work will appreciate this book, and rally ‘round the recipes in the chapters titled “Barks and Clusters” and “Bonbons and Other Sweetmeats.” Approachable is the operative word for the recipes in this book, even though some call for the use of a candy thermometer.
The batch of candied citrus peel (I used orange peel) was lovely–pretty, moist, and fragrant–and the marzipan-filled dates, rich and satisfying. Together, both treats were a perfect after-dinner nibble with strong coffee and, along with a beautiful plate of vanilla macarons I had just baked (cookies are a favorite at my house), a cheery close to an informal dinner.
Food Styling: The Art of Preparing Food for the Camera, by Delores Custer (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010), $75.00
Delores Custer, a food stylist, built a career on fine-tuning the look of food for television and publication, culminating in an instructional volume titled Food Styling: The Art of Preparing Food for the Camera.
In our visual culture, the audience for Food Styling is not only for professionals whose job it is to cook, bake, or otherwise fashion food-based items to be photographed. Any individual who needs to capture a pleasing food-related image should consider using this book as a reference for composing camera-ready food.
Taking a trip through the contents of Food Styling reveals the author’s range, with chapters devoted to all of the preliminaries (“The Medium is Everything,” and “Prepping the Assignment”), then moves on to cover aspects from advance preparation and working with a photographer to assembling the equipment necessary to actualize the job. All of this is a prelude to the meatiest section of the volume titled “Working with the Food: Overcoming Challenges”: This is a comprehensive view of styling in a range of categories, including food for breakfast, sandwiches, dairy products, main course proteins, sauces, and garnishes. The concluding chapters in this section concern “baked goods” and they are valuable reading for visitors of baking style diary.
In the baked goods sections (“Cakes: the pleasures and pitfalls,” Cookies: aiming for consistencies,” and “Chocolate: the problem child for the food stylist” among them), you will learn viable solutions for preparing beautiful bar cookies; creating just the right look for drop cookies; baking and presenting a flawless pie; ways to bake, assemble, and stage layer cakes; and how to form the best-looking dollop of whipped cream. One of the most intriguing sections is the information regarding the baking, styling, and presentation of chocolate chip cookies (page 266, and following pages). On those pages, we learn how certain ingredients, baking techniques, and background materials contribute to a different end result.
Food Styling is a resource book that is destined to become the industry standard of its genre.