Tuesdays with Dorie: Apple-Quince Bundt

Most of you readers know that I belong to several online baking groups (how could you miss it), but it has occurred to me that many of you who don't also belong to said groups may not have any real context for what I'm doing here. I joined all of these groups because I wanted to have weekly recipe assignments and really delve into certain cookbooks or techniques, but along the way I have become fascinated by the communities that make up each group.

The group that started it all was Tuesdays with Dorie, a baking challenge started by Laurie Woodward of Slush. It began as a challenge between a few friends, and quickly grew almost out of control. Laurie, however, girded her loins and took real charge, and now runs her unexpected kingdom like a serious pro. The group is now closed to new members, and has some simple rules--you have to make at least two out of every four recipes, and post on Tuesday. I usually make at least three out of four monthly recipes, though I'm not always stellar about posting on time. Beyond the recipes, the TWD bakers are a mixed lot, but mostly they are home bakers (many I would characterize as down-home bakers), many of whom just want to make some chocolate, many of whom are in it to expand their comfort zones. 


Some of them, presumably unknowingly, are also in the business of expanding my comfort zones. I'm about as stereotypical an Eastern liberal as you can get--Jewish, raised in Western MA, living in Brooklyn, NY, where the majority of my family comes from, Seven Sisters, artist, librarian, Democracy Now-loving, huge believer in social services, foodie...well, you get the point. Some of my fellow TWD-ers, not to put too fine a one on it, do not fit this profile. They're from all over the country, from many walks of life. I have a vague impression that many of them are home-schooling Mormon moms (this may be a broad impression gained from just one or two blogs, conflated). That impression may be a little general, but it is true that many of them are mothers, many live in places very unlike Brooklyn, and many are religious in a way that is very different from the religion of many of the people I know. We do not all share a political viewpoint, to put it mildly. Some of us, hell probably a lot of them (I am not included in this category, for better or for worse) would rather never talk politics on the intertubes. We vary in age from college students to grandmothers. Some of us are more polite about leaving comments for one another, some of us (um, look over here) were never cheerleader types and rarely leave messages say 'You did a great job!,' much as we may appreciate them.

A random sampling from this morning's blogroll, just to show how limited the above descriptions are:


Nichi, from Bakeologie, is a certified pastry chef with a degree from Le Cordon Bleu Patisserie & Baking Program at the California School of Culinary Arts in Pasadena. She makes her living at a computer software company, and is, incidentally, a better blog designer than I.


Amy, of Amy Ruth Bakes, is a mother of teenagers, a very witty writer, and has a beautiful aesthetic sense in her plating. 


April, of Short + Rose, lives in Memphis, and, in her own words, "like[s] to bake, knit, garden, travel and hang out with awesome people. [She] hate[s] hot weather, mosquitoes, rude people and answering the phone." She has a second blog about infertility and Canadian emo plays on her site.

Mary Ann of Meet Me in the Kitchen stages Ancient Greek cafes with her kids. 

There are legions more of us, including French, Aussie, and German members, and many Americans living abroad. There is, as far as I know, one man participating. As you can see from the brief sampling above, variety is king. In addition to their blog posts, I get to know these people from Q&A forums on the TWD site, where everyone shares issues and queries about the recipes. There's no final moral here, no 'we all bake and blog, and it brings us together' moment. But I do like being a part of TWD, this odd little affiliation.

This week's recipe for TWD was a Double Apple Bundt Cake. The double in the title comes from the use of apples in two forms, grated and apple butter. I didn't have any apple butter, so I used a slightly tart quince paste I made with last year's quinces. Being so acidic, it's held up well in the refrigerator, but I decided it really was time to get it used up, as this year's quinces were coming in. It added a slightly sharp and tart note to this soft and sweet cake. The cake was wonderful, but it wasn't going to keep for long on the counter in the hot humid weather of last week, so I had to put most of it into the refrigerator. I thought refrigeration ruined the texture, as it was a butter cake, but Matt didn't mind.

Blogger Incest (& Jam)

A strange realization hit me when I began to plan the week's posts. Nearly every recipe I've made this week (and most weeks) was cribbed from someone else's blog. Not only that, but several of those were cribbed from other blogs.

Looking at it one way, it's a wonderful sharing of ideas that allows a cook to see how several different cooks approach a single recipe. Having gotten a sense of the tastes and biases of each blogger, the amalgamation helps me see the direction I'd like to take the recipe in for my kitchen.

Looking at it another way, bloggers are an awfully incestuous bunch who can't think for ourselves. Also, any mangled keystroke made while typing the word 'blogger' tends to turn it into something that looks like 'booger.'

Ultimately, I suppose using recipes from other bloggers isn't much different from using recipes from cookbooks, in terms of creativity. Either way, I'm not writing them. But it is funny to watch the ripples of certain trends dribble through the blog world.

This week, many of the recipes I was drawn to involved some facet of jam...I love making jam, sauce, and jelly, but don't have a good pot to can in or a real canning confidence, so once I make a jam, I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to use it up. This recipe for a Jam Crostata from The New York Times via The Wednesday Chef via David Lebovitz has proven an excellent solution to this delightful problem. It's flexible, simple, and delicious, and now I've used up almost the whole jar of my homemade quince jam. Looking back, I see that David posted this recipe in July, when I must have seen it and filed it without knowing, because it came back to me out of some mental crevice the other day, and I wound up with this...

Not a bad day's work. For my next tart, if I don't just eat it all with a spoon, I made easy and unctuous (and I never say unctuous, but that's what it is) pear butter with nutmeg and cardamom. No picture here yet, but check out the link, The Traveler's Lunchbox has great photos. Pear butter is amazing. Make pear butter. Now. Simmer it slowly and gloat over its strange candied lusciousness.

Things in Pastry: Empanadas and Tarte Tatin

Dinner last night at my parents' house became a communal effort, a kind of post-fast blitz. I find lately that fasting changes my life more than it used to. Now it doesn't just involve not eating, it is also not cooking. And these days, I spend approximately an hour a day in recreational cooking. A day without menu planning, blog reading, puttering, and eating is a day with a very different rhythm. The next day, of course, it was back to the silliness, and Ellen and my mother and Matt and I made a startling amount of dinner. Pastry began and pastry ended, as I got absorbed in some empanadas and Ellen made a delicious tarte tatin from a hoarded old NYtimes recipe. Here she is rolling her pastry...
Here I am rolling mine.The filling for the empanadas, which could have used some more seasoning and some more juice, was turkey and onions and potato with some corn and paprika. The dough was cooperative but too buttery for the ultimately dry payoff. Some tweaking to be done, but like the dumplings, these are always fun to make and fun to eat.

Being home also means I was able to collect our neighbor's fallen quinces, some of which I already boiled into a very stiff jam, most of which are still awaiting their fate. They smell like fall and taste like a citrus-y apple.
Speaking of apples, I didn't take pictures, but we held a little heirloom apple tasting with local russets this afternoon, and the clear winner if you're a fan of dense and tart apples was the Orleans Reinette. Good thing, too, because I couldn't tell most of the others apart. If I remember correctly, there was a Golden Russet and an Ashmead's Kernel.