the dough that keeps on giving....

We made more goodies with brioche dough on Wednesday.  The roll is Pain au Raisin (raisin bread).  The dough is rolled out into a thin rectangle, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with raisins marinated in sugar syrup and rum.  The dough is then rolled up and cut into individual biscuits.  yum.

The other is Pain Perdu (french toast).  We start with balls of brioche bread and cut off the top and bottom.  Rather than dipping the bread in raw eggs (yuk), this is dipped in Creme Anglaise (pastry cream without the cornstarch) and cooked.  This may threaten my good standing as a Yankee, but I prefer this version of french toast without maple syrup.

streeeeetch......

Today we stretched strudel dough for making apple strudel.  The dough was initially rolled out to be about 18" long and 8 inches wide.  With our handy partner, we floured up our arms, reached under the dough and started stretching it down the table.  It probably quadrupled in area and became so thin that you could see through it.  We then rolled up some apple filling in it and baked it to make strudel.  

brioche dough day....

My experience with Brioche in the bread block was disappointing.  It tasted like a stick of butter.  We made a couple of items from a slightly tweaked brioche recipe and I might be a convert.  The rectangular Nantere bread is slightly sweet and very fluffy.  A tasty application is to pull those little segments apart and make French toast out of them.  Each segment is roughly a 2 inch cube.  That would be a fun little breakfast treat.

The round Galette bread is about 10 inches in diameter.  It is also made with brioche dough.  It has Creme Chantilly in the middle.  It would be a great dessert.

if i was vienna, i'd be mad....

For our practical test this week, we made croissants and danish.  Both were originally made in Vienna.  Croissants are now thought of as a French pastry and a danish has made Denmark famous.  A lot of the credit (or blame) is said to go to Marie Antoinette.  She's credited with bringing a lot of the recipes from Vienna to Paris.  I'm dubious but that's the story.

We also made baklava and spanikopita this week.  My favorite of the two was the spanikopita.  It's a mixture of spinach, onion and feta cheese in a very thin, flaky dough.  Baklava is good but it's really sweet.  I'm saving my sweet tooth for next week - strudel, beignets and donuts.  Yikes

i wonder who suzette was...

We made Crepes Suzette today.  I'm a big crepe fan and I love oranges so this is a great breakfast for me.  For the pyromaniac in me, it was fun to flambe the Suzette sauce.

In addition to the crepes, we made savory croissants. We made three types of fillings for the croissants.  (1) Ham and swiss.  (2) Roasted red peppers and feta cheese.  (3) Apple, onion, bacon and cheddar cheese.  It's getting tough to keep my girlish figure.

wienerbrod.....

"What do the Danish call danishes, Alex."  The French don't call fries french fries and the Danish don't call danishes danishes.  Wienerbrod is Dutch for Vienna Bread which is where most of the recipes came from.  The spice cardamon, which is in all danish dough is originally from Denmark, hence the name, danish.

The dough is relatively easy to make but perfecting the shapes will take some practice. But, for my first attempt, you can probably pick out the pinwheel danish. Those rectangular danishes are tasty.  The one with the heavy powder sugar has chocolate in the center. The other one has almond cream in it.

Croissant dough is very similar to danish dough so we did those as well.  These are Croissant au Beurre (in butter).  Tomorrow is a taste comparison using shortening or cream cheese as substitutes for butter.  I'm already guessing that butter will be my fat of choice.

i'm a pepper, you're a pepper...

I made my yearly pilgrimage to Dublin, TX for the Dr Pepper birthday celebration.  They turned 118 this year.  Dublin is home to the only Dr Pepper bottling plant that still uses pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup.  I ran in the 10K (6.2 miles) run which started at 8:00am.  I wish Mr and Mrs Pepper had the good Doctor a little earlier in the year.  It's hot in central Texas on June 13.  It's about a 3 hour drive so it made for an early morning.  They have the run, arts and crafts, music, factory tours, and all the Dr Pepper you can drink.  I think I drank too much.  It was much more plentiful than water so I kept on drinking it.

If you look at it logically, it's hard to justify the 3 hour drive for the activities listed but I enjoy these little Texas town festivals.  It's a nice change of pace.  I'll be there next year.