Shiny, Silky, Sweet Jam
I have a history of making rather mediocre jam. Usually I make raspberry and usually it doesn't set and I have to "re-jam" it, with more cooking and commercial pectin. Of course any homemade jam tastes good on a thick slice of buttered Como toast, but my jam is often too firm and doesn't have the silky mouth feel that blue ribbon jam should have.
Although it's mid-summer, it feels like June (or January) and berries are just really hitting their stride.
Read more...Dutch or Deutsch? Either way it's a yummy pie!
If you have ever had apple pie served to you in the Netherlands by actual Dutch people, you know a Dutch apple pie is not at all like Dutch Apple Pie. The real Dutch apple pie is more like a torte or tart baked in a deep spring-form pan with a sweet cookie-like crust and a heavily spiced apple filling with raisins (and sometimes even custard). In the United States, a Dutch Apple Pie is a single crust apple pie topped with crunchy, buttery streusel.
Read more...Pie crust surprise: It's whole wheat
Fabulous pie crust made with whole wheat flour? Impossible. Or so I thought. Whole grains might have the upper hand nutrition-wise, but most everyone in the professional baking world knows that the refined stuff simply makes a flakier croissant, a light, fluffy biscuit and the most delicate pie crust.
So color me shocked when last week, GCB Cuisine Director Piper Davis returned from Kneading Conference West - an artisan baking confab in Mount Vernon, Wash.
Read more...NEW U-Bake Whole Wheat Pizza Dough!
After receiving lots of requests we are finally unveiling our U-Bake Whole Wheat Pizza Dough! With the various low- carb diets of the past several years, whole grains have captured the culinary imagination of this country. Grains and seeds that have long been forgotten are returning to the spotlight. We're eating them for health benefits, certainly, but we've also been rewarded with great flavors and texture. These grains and seeds can be sweet and nutty and complex.
Read more...Chocolate Cream Pie
I'm not really the cream pie type, and I blame it on JP Patches, the early morning clown of my Seattle childhood.
Scary!
He'd hear a knock on the door and open it only to get a pie in the face. See for yourself on YouTube! I never thought it was funny and I still don't.
Read more...Cranberry Pear Galette
Everybody has their favorite go to procrastination activity...cleaning, paying bills, matching socks... Me? I bake. I had deleted about 20 opening sentences to this blog before I started to think about dessert, the bowl of ripe pears attracting fruit flies on my counter and the big bag of fresh cranberries in my fridge.
Read more...Apple Cake
For a couple weeks now Alan Frost from Riverwood Farms in Dayton, has been delivering boxes of his sweet Johnagold and tart Honeycrisp apples to the bakery. This means our seasonal cake now celebrates the apple and today I'm baking Cream Cheese Apple Cake at home.
Over the years at Grand Central Bakery, we have baked this tasty cake in many forms. We have sold it as a cupcake topped with maple cream cheese frosting.
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