Alpha Bakers -- "The Dutch" Pecan Sandies

 

Buttery sables are my favorite kind of cookies, and these fragile pecan sandies are a perfect example of the type. Made with crumbly pecans, cinnamon sugar, and browned butter, they have a rich lightness that mirrors their eponymous sandiness. My sister says, "I kind of get dry mouth looking at the words "pecan sandies," but I think if she had one of these, especially with black coffee, she might find it suitably moist. Just kidding, she's hard to please and doesn't drink coffee.

Alpha Bakers - Lemon Posset Sponge

A quick and easy recipe this week--or at least easy. One sponge cake (let's not kill ourselves and call it shortcake), covered in a quick lemon cream. Right up my street. A few special things:

1. The sponge included brown butter. Brown butter is a very good idea. Deb over at Smitten Kitchen tends to suggest brown butter even when it isn't called for. Since I have some leftover, I will probably take her advice soon.

2. The sponge is brushed with lemon syrup and then with apple jelly. There was no apple jelly to be had at the approximately 17 gourmet stores and delis near me, so I settled for pear. Pear jelly is also a very good idea.

The recipe was for individual sponges, but my Maryann pan is a single, and I was taking it to work anyway, so I just made the one. I had a few flour balls in the bottom but just picked them out with a knife tip.

3. Posset is fun. Posset is all of the medieval children's books I used to read. Posset is nursery sponge and jam and mysterious things people in books eat that I never really knew were things. Posset is just cream thickened with, in this case, sugar and Meyer lemon juice. Posset posset posset. Drink your posset. Posset is fun. My posset was creamy and nice, and a little mild for my taste. Regular lemons next time.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Gold Ingots (Financiers)

It's clear that I'm missing something with financiers. I've now made several variations and I just find myself underwhelmed. This isn't a chocolate problem--I love vanilla and almond and brown butter. Maybe this all goes deeper, deep into the heart of my relatively broke lifestyle and fear of suit culture. In the end, I'm just no financier.

On the upside, they're quite cute, and Matt likes them. He found them 'particularly helpful' as breakfast this morning as he moved the car.

This post, and the several following, will feature some catching up, as I get up a new head of steam after a Labor Day weekend vacation and two weeks of no stove or oven. For the fall, I hope to spend some time re-thinking what I am trying to do with this blog, and hopefully introducing more photos, some narrative arcs, and some guest posting. I may also be participating in Project Food Blog, a contest put on by Foodbuzz. More on this shortly.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how food and cooking relate to my private and professional life, and how I would like them to. I'm thinking of taking on another internship to broaden my bread skills, and musing on various business ventures, and also just thinking about how to improve our eating habits at home. All in all, it's going to be busy, and hopefully there will be plenty to read and think about, and some exciting recipes and techniques to try.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Peanut Butter Financiers

This week's Heavenly Cake was Peanut Butter Financiers, or ingots. Fancy people make financiers in mini-loaf shaped pans, to symbolize bars of gold. Those of us who are not in high finance make them in our vintage mini-muffin pans that Miriam gave us, which makes them more of mini-cupcakes, although has few other impacts on their general composition. 

Because I made an off-schedule cake this week (Almond Shamah Chiffon with Burnt-Sugar-Apricot Mousseline Buttercream, for those who care), this was the second project of the week that required me to toast and process sliced almonds into almond flour. As recently as last week, I was using regular roasted skin-on almonds in a devil-may-care way, but sensing a lot of this to come, I sprung for some blanched, sliced suckers. They make good decorations too. I have discovered, though, that my little mini food processor does not really do a good job of processing the almonds to a full powder. Usually, I would just use pre-processed almond flour, but all of Rose's recipes very specifically avoid even the mention of that option, so I have to assume there's a reason. (According to Nigella Lawson, there's a fairly serious moisture difference between the preprocessed stuff and freshly ground almonds, so maybe that's it). 

These little cakes weren't much more than brown butter, ground almonds, whip eggs, add peanut butter. They were good, but underwhelming...just little dense peanut butter cupcakes, to which I also added a little buckwheat flour. I just made a half batch at home, and didn't take them to the bakery, as I had a sense that they would turn out not terribly impressive visually.  Still, we ate them, and are ready to move on to the next cake.

While we're here, though, I wanted to take a second to register my unease with the whole 'baby cakes' section of the book. While I appreciate a few instructions for how to convert recipes, and a few fun adaptations such as the Bostini, I think a whole section on this topic seems redundant and overly trendy. Maybe it's my lack of amusement at cupcakes in general, though, speaking sourly through my mouthful of peanut buttery goodness.