Clockwork Lemon

Anna Olson's Chocolate Chip Cookies

I suspect we all have people in our lives who hold the classic chocolate chip cookie as the perfect baked good. My dad is one of those people; whenever I tell him about the next recipe that I'm working on he suggests that maybe I make chocolate chip cookies instead. Not chocolate chip cookies with a twist, just the classic, basic, crispy-on-the-edges-soft-in-the-middle chocolate chip cookie. Why mess around with perfection?

So when Anna Olson's beautiful new book Back To Baking arrived on my doorstep thanks to the people at Whitecap Books I was originally torn as to which recipe to try out first..

Homemade Farmhouse Cheddar - Part Two

Homemade Cheddar Part One Here <--

Part of the cheesemaking process is allowing the cheese to age. Cheese needs to sit for months, and sometimes years to get those complex flavors and interesting textures. It needs patience combined with weekly check-ins to see how it's developing. 

It doesn't need some food blogger opening the cheese cave door every couple of hours to manhandle it and debate whether it would be possible to just eat it right now and not tell anyone what happened. Some cheese ages in peace (other people's cheese) and some cheese is constantly harassed (my cheese). 

Suddenly buying cheese that's 2,3, or sometimes 6 years old is mindblowing. Someone waited SIX YEARS before slicing into this cheese? I've been dying for the last four weeks to check out my cheddar, never mind if I had to wait until I was 33 to try it!

 

 

Chai Cinnamon Buns - Tips and Tricks

I recently embarked on a cinnamon bun baking marathon while coming up with this Chai cinnamon bun recipe for my Globe and Mail column. And by 'marathon' I mean making cinnamon buns every evening for three weeks straight. If only my new year's resolution had been to eat as many cinnamon buns as humanly possible, then I'd be able to cross it off and bask in my accomplishment for the rest of 2013.

 

 

Over the course of the bun baking bonanza I took notes on what made the best cinnamon buns as well as which make-ahead method worked best with the dough. Unfortunately, there were so many notes that there was no way to fit them all into my column unless I could convince the editors to dedicate pages and pages to cinnamon buns.  Luckily, blog space is unlimited so I'm compiling all my notes here so that everyone can get the most out of the recipe.

Enriched Poppy Seed Bread

It seems that the more basic a recipe is, the more people there are searching for it's perfect version. Everyone wants that moist, fluffy white cake recipe, the dark and delicious one-bowl chocolate cake recipe, and the no-fail go-to white bread recipe. 

For me the hunt is always on for the best enriched white bread recipe. I already have a go-to white bread recipe of my own but I have found that most enriched white breads leave me wishing for something more.. or when they are too rich, something less. 

I want a bread that is extremely soft, slightly sweet, and has enough richness to let you know that this is beyond your regular weekly loaf but not so much that it risks turning into a brioche or a cake. I want it to be delicious plain, toasted, topped with savory or sweet spreads, and to keep for at least a couple of days before going stale (why oh why does enriched have to go stale so quickly?). 

My expectations were high and my list of requirements was long, so it's lucky that extra bread is so easy to give away because our counter was piling high with rejected loaves (still tasty.. just not exactly what I was looking for). 

Homemade Asiago {Cheesepalooza}

For me, Asiago is the cheese that accidentally makes it's way into my shopping cart when I was supposed  to buy Parmesan. The two cheeses look so similar and are often right on top of each other in the displays that sometimes it's not until I'm tossing the wrapper from the finished cheese that I notice it was Asiago all along. 

Sneaky, sneaky Asiago. 

Regardless of the possibly sinister nature of this cheese, I was excited that it was chosen for this month's Cheesepalooza challenge. The recipe makes two little wheels of cheese; one to eat after a few weeks when the cheese is young and another to age to that crumbly, parmesan-ish texture. I've found that I'm pretty impatient with the whole "aging for months on end" process so the prospect of trying the cheese early appealed to me. 

As the cheese making challenges progress, the recipes get a little bit more time consuming. With our farmhouse cheddar we had issues with the instruction to bring the temperature of the cheese curds up only a few degrees over the course of 40 minutes. Although we got through it just fine (after putting out a mayday help help plea on twitter) this time we employed some advice from a fellow cheesemaker and used a hot water bath in our sink to slowly and evenly increase the milk's temperature. 

Look at our sweet set up: digital thermometers for monitoring both the milk and water temperatures. You could actually see the heat transfer from the water to the milk when the temperature of the water would drop by a degree at the exact same time that the milk temperature rose one degree. The most interesting science is the kind that gives you cheese when all the learning is done. 

Brush Embroidery Sugar Cookies

Although I often confess my love for decorating techniques that involve lots of finicky little steps and time consuming details, there's another category of techniques that I love even more: ones that are easier than they look. Brush embroidery falls squarely into that category, it looks complicated and time consuming, it seems like it requires advanced piping skills and years of practice. But it's not. And it doesn't. In fact, all of these cookies in the photos were my first attempt at brush embroidery. As long as you have the right tools and a bit of time set aside it's a very forgiving technique.

I'd first seen brush embroidery on some cookies on Pinterest. The pin didn't lead anywhere helpful and I wasn't even sure what it was called. Luckily, thanks to the magic of the internet all it took was a bit of poking around on Google and Youtube before I came across this video tutorial. It's such a straightforward technique that the video doesn't even need verbal instructions.

With Valentine's Days approaching I decided to draw up some pink, white, and gold designs to work from to give away as pretty, edible V-day cards. Then I baked up some heart shaped sugar cookies and whipped together a batch of royal icing.