Category Archives: Baking
Dorista Celebrations {ffwd}
Today is a day of many celebrations for French Fridays with Dorie. First of all, we’re celebrating Dorie Greenspan’s birthday! Next, we’re celebrating Dorie’s new book, out this month, Baking Chez Moi. And, finally, we’re celebrating four years of French Fridays as we move into the fifth and final year of cooking our way through Dorie’s book Around My French Table.
All of these reasons make it a special Friday for me: I love birthdays, especially mine, but I do love anybody’s birthday. I love cookbooks, having hundreds on the shelves (and the floor, and the counters, etc.). And I love my wonderful Dorista friends and being part of French Fridays.
How are we celebrating all these things? Well, we’re actually stepping outside the box for the day. Rather than making something selected from Around My French Table, we’re baking something from the new book, Baking Chez Moi, which comes out next week. There are several recipes from the book that are available on the internet, so we’re making a choice from those.
I decided to try Palets de Dames, Lille Style, an iced cakey sugar cookie. The stiff batter is mixed up in a stand mixer before chilling. Then you shape the cookies into small balls. The cookies spread quite a bit, ending up rather flat, so be sure to space them far apart. I baked one dozen at a time on a half sheet pan. For the first tray, I used my smallest cookie scoop, but they baked up into irregular shapes. For the remaining trays, I used the cookie scoop to approximate portioning, but rolled the dough into uniform balls between my hands. Even then, the cookies in the middle spread into nice circles while the ones on the edges were more oval. I think the baked cookies gave me a map of the unevenness inside my oven.
Once the cookies cooled, I mixed up the simple sugar-milk icing. I didn’t have any milk, so used heavy cream instead. I had to use at least twice the amount of liquid called for to get the icing to the right consistency, perhaps because the cream was thicker than the milk.
Surprisingly, it is the flat side of the cookie, the bottom, that gets dipped into the icing, changing to the rounded top to the bottom, so they roll around a little bit on the plate. (From official photo of these cookies, it looks to me like they were done the opposite way.) For a festive touch, I sprinkled some of the cookies with some colored sugar.
While I prefer a crisper or chewier cookie, these are perfect with a celebratory cup of tea: light, not too sweet, and delicately pretty. If you’d like to try them yourself, you can find the recipe here.
So, happy birthday to you, Dorie, and congratulations on your newest book! I look forward to baking more recipes from it. And to my Dorista friends, here’s to another year together. It’s been quite the unexpected ride over the past four years.
To see what other delicious birthday treats were baked up this week, check out my Dorista friends below, or follow their links here.
- Liz from That Skinny Chick Can Bake
- Adriana from Great Food 360º
- Gaye from Laws of the Kitchen
- Sanya from Kitchen Therapy
- Mardi from eat.live.travel.write
- Kathy from Bakeaway with Me
- Christy from Confessions of a Culinary Diva
- Tricia and Nana from Tricia and Nana Cooking with Dorie
- Katie from Prof Who Cooks
Chocolate Cream Puffs with Mascarpone Filling
- Mardi from eat.live.travel.write
- Cher from The Not So Exciting Adventures of a Dabbler
- Kathy from Bakeaway with Me
- Tammy from Chez Nous
- Mary from Lights on Bright No Brakes
- Betsy from A Plateful of Happiness
- Rosa from One Expat’s Life
- Teresa from One Wet Foot
- Diane from Cafe Mom Cooks
- Susan from Create Amazing Meals
- Emily from Emily’s Cooking Foray
- Eileen from Cookbook Immersion Project
- Christy from Confessions of a Culinary Diva
- Cher from The Not So Exciting Adventures of a Dabbler
- Teresa from One Wet Foot
- Margaret from Tea and Scones
- Alice from A Mama, Baby & Shar-Pei in the Kitchen
gâteau basque {ffwd}
I feel like I might say this every time we make a dessert for French Fridays with Dorie (because it’s true), but I am much more of a cook than a baker. And, when it comes to baking, the sweets I like best are simple ones that showcase the main ingredient, be it butter, chocolate, or fruit.
I was thrilled to find that this week’s selection, Gâteau Basque, matches up with what I enjoy so perfectly! I could tell from reading the recipe in the book that the Basque know how to make a cake that I will adore. To me, this was more of a giant cookie sandwich or a double-crusted jam tart than a cake, but that’s OK with me.
This recipe also used a technique that we used once or twice before while cooking from this book, one that I always think “brilliant” when I’m instructed to do it, and then promptly forget about. That technique is to roll a soft dough between pieces of wax paper before chilling it. I don’t know if it works with all dough, but it sure works with this one.
My one set of round cake pans are 9-inch, not the called for 8-inch. I was concerned the resulting dough would roll out too thin, so I used an 8-inch springform pan instead. (For some reason I have many different-sized springform pans.) Worked perfectly. I did trace the base of the pan and cut out the exact size when I was ready to assemble the gâteau for baking. That left some scraps to egg wash and bake for a “cook’s treat”. Those bonus cookies were tasty. They reminded me of the salted butter breakups which hailed from Brittany, I think, which in turn reminded me of Pepperidge Farm Chessmen cookies.
To assemble, one disk of dough is placed in the pan, covered with jam (leaving a small border), then the second disk is placed on top and the edges are sealed. The top is brushed with an egg wash and cross-hatched with a fork. Lovely! I was tempted to use some jam from my pantry, but I bought the traditional cherry jam instead.
Now that I know what the “original” tastes like, I would not hesitate to vary the filling in the future, and there will be a future. I loved the gâteau Basque. I also love any baked goods that can stay at room temperature and be shown off in my cake dome. Another plus for this one.
To try this at home (which you should), you can find the recipe here on the NPR site, accompanying an interview with Dorie Greenspan. Of course, FFwD recipes can always be found in Dorie Greenspan’s book Around My French Table. To check out my Dorista friends’ gâteaux Basque check their links here.
A Plateful of Happiness 