Yesterday my review for the book that inspired my Bookish Bakes posts posted, The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux by Samantha Verant. I love reading about food because it gives me so many ideas. In this book, chef Sophie has traveled from NYC where her dreams went up in flames back to her family’s chateau in France, which her grandmere Odette has transformed into two restaurants and a hotel. There, she rediscovers her love of food and finds a new purpose, all while making Odette’s favorite dessert, creme brulee. So, of course, I had to make creme brulee for this Bookish Bakes post. Never mind I’ve never eaten one, much…
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Adventures in Ratio Baking: Turning Custard Into Pudding
So, a while ago, one of my bloggy friends (hi, Lisa!) asked something about pudding. I didn’t have an answer then about the difference between custard and pudding as they sound a lot alike. Since then, I’ve ended up with egg yolks on my hands and no good idea of what to use them for. I decided to finally look into what, exactly, pudding is. It’s so simple it almost made me want to roll my eyes. Add a thickener, like flour or cornstarch, and you get pudding. Yes, that’s right. Pudding is little more than custard with a bit of starch mixed in (the eggs are actually optional though…
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Berry Yogurt Tart (revisited)
Wow, this one was from about 2 years ago, when my mom and I used to take my baby and toddler to the local farmer’s market and buy up some French-style yogurt. Now I’m too paranoid to go to farmer’s markets, but am really suddenly missing this yogurt, and the too good berry tarts I used to make with them. First published July 20, 2018 When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had to go in every week for a progesterone shot (thanks to my son who decided to be born early). Most days were fairly routine: get my son into the car, drive over, get (progesterone) shot. But,…
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Adventures in Ratio Baking: When Making Beignets, Flour is Your Best Friend
I’ve always wanted to go to New Orleans, but not for Mardi Gras. When I was a kid, my mom and I used to watch all sorts of shows about haunted places and ghosts. New Orleans came up a lot, so I’ve always wanted to do one of the haunted tours. Oh, yeah, and I want some beignets because they sound really good. Because of the pandemic, traveling to New Orleans is something we’ll do years from now, but I still like to dream. There isn’t much I can do about the ghosts since we don’t live in a haunted building and my imaginary friend (a ghost) apparently decided to…
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How to Make Bread
Let’s try something a little different. Please let me know if you enjoyed it, or thought it was completely bizarre. Step One: Measure out 15 parts of flour and 9 parts of water. Add one teaspoon of yeast and 0.3 ounces of salt to the flour. Stir. I was in separate pieces, once. When I was both a part of my mother and a part of my father. They had to decide to join so that my disparate pieces could be joined together. My soul took so many pieces from my mother and so many pieces from my father and spun them together. Step Two: Gradually add the water to…
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Toasted Coconut Custard
A few weeks ago, I discovered a can of coconut milk sitting in the cabinet, about to expire. I hate wasting things, so my mind started whirling about what I could do with it. Coconut cake! It was nearly perfect. I’m still tweaking it, so, one day, in the next few months, I’ll share that recipe. Anyways, after making the coconut cake, I discovered I still had coconut flakes left over. I spent days pondering what to do with it. I started thinking about toasting it and making it part of a trail mix, but then I started wondering if I could ratio bake something else and use up some…
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Triple Berry Muffins
Now that Christmas has passed, our local markets seem to think it’s time for summer, and so they stock the produce section with berries. Considering I live in Southern California, warm weather in January is possible (70s and sunny all week!), so I suppose they’re not wrong about summer approaching. Alas, it isn’t quite berry season, which means I’m sorely tempted, but the quality is spotty and the taste is only perfect if you happen to enjoy tart. Yet, I still adore berries. Well, except blueberries. I think those are disgusting, but I’ll happily stock my fridge with all the others. Whenever I see them in the market, I must…
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A Year of Adventures in Ratio Baking
About a year ago, I got it into my head that I’d like a kitchen scale and I’d like to figure out ratio baking. The Husband got me a kitchen scale for Christmas, probably because I wouldn’t shut up about it, and then my brain panicked because it meant I should actually use it. I spent the first few weeks of the year thinking about it, thinking of taking the scale out of the cabinet and making something. I wasn’t quite sure of what to make, and I froze again. Then I decided I wanted cake, and the cake ratio looked simple (1:1:1:1 flour to sugar to eggs to butter)…
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Adventures in Ratio Baking: Let’s Try Custard Again
A few weeks ago, I tried making custard using it’s ratio of 2:1 dairy to eggs. Since it just says dairy, and since I just happened to have a can of sweetened condensed milk sitting around doing nothing, I thought, well, why not? Turns out there’s a reason why I’ve never seen a custard recipe use sweetened condensed milk. It’s thick! And super sweet. Last week I decided it was time to try again. The right way. With actual dairy. And I mean using milk. Just milk and eggs, and, of course, cocoa powder because chocolate. Everything is better with chocolate. Well, that’s a lie. I wouldn’t want chocolate on…
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A Christmas Cookie Tradition
Neither an adventure in ratio baking nor a recipe this week. Instead, since it’s December, I wanted to write about a Christmas tradition my mom started when I was very young. For as long as I can remember, my mom would spend an entire day baking cookies. The funniest thing about them was that all the recipes came from cook books, but everyone raved about how good they were and would ask for the recipe. My mom always refused to give them away, but they were in printed cook books and could have been found by anyone. Haha, just one of our many family secrets! But it was really a tradition…
