Baked And Churned

Blog

Speculoos Hamentaschen
Speculoos Hamentaschen for Purim!

I hadn’t baked for almost a month because I came down with covid19. The good news is, I recovered, and I’m fine now. Feeling better happened to correspond to the time of Purim, so this was a perfect bake to get back into things.

Hamentaschen

Now in my mind, there is pretty much one best type of hamentaschen, and all the rest pale in comparison. Poppyseed, or mohn in Yiddish. These are what I make most years. This year I didn’t have a chance to go to the store and get the filling (see covid19+ above). So I got creative this year, I had a jar of Trader Joe’s speculoos in the cupboard, and I wondered if I could use that. Well, sure enough, I found a recipe over at myjewishlearning.com.
Speculoos Hamantaschen

Traditional hamentaschen with a non traditional speculoos filling.
½ cup unsalted butter
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 Tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 ¼ cups all purpose flour
¼ tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
Hamentaschen
Beat the butter and sugar together until smooth in stand mixer with paddle attachement.
Add egg, milk and vanilla until mixed thoroughly.
Sift together the flour, baking powder and salt in a separate bowl.
Add dry mixture to wet mixture until incorporated.
Chill dough for 2 hours
Dust work surface with powdered sugar. Roll out dough to 1/4" thick (or your preference but I find thinner hard to work with).
Cut out ~3inch circles, you can use a circular cutter, or I just used a tin can with both sides removed.
Dab about a teaspoon if speculoos into the center of each circle.
Eggwash the rest of the circle around the filling, this helps it stick together.
Fold into triangles.
Preheat oven to 400F while chilling the assembled hamentaschen in the fridge for about 15 minutes.
Bake for 8 minutes or until they start to get golden brown.
Decorating
This is of course optional, but I finished with some melted chocalte drizzled on top, and pearl sugar sprinkled onto that.
Hamentaschen

They came out great! A bit on the cakey side.. I tried making thinner ones and had a lot of trouble getting them to stay together. Next batch I’ll do 1/4″ again, but add a couple of minutes to the baking time to get them to crisp up a bit more.
February 28, 2021
Chocolate Babka for GBBO Week 4

Chocolate Babka is one of my favorite things to eat and to bake, so I was thrilled it was a challenge for the GBBO bake along.

I usually follow Uri Scheft’s (of Breads Bakery) recipe for babka. Breads Bakery is a fantastic bakery in NYC and the chocolate babka is their signature. They also do fun stuff for most of the Jewish holidays. I’ll probably use their hamentashen recipe in a few weeks for Purim.

Chocolate Babka

Ironically the one time I really wanted to show off the babka I made it didn’t come out as good as it normally does. I was a bit rushed to get it made in time for the challenge. I didn’t do as good a job twisting and forming as I usually do and you can really see that in the crumb shot..

Babka Crumb

There should be swirls all through it. As you can see, it was kind of jsut one ribbon of chocolate running through it. That being said, it was still delicious!

For proof that I can, and usually do, do a better job than this.. I refer you back to my Friendsgiving Babkas I made back in 2019 when seeing friends was still a thing. They looked more like this..

January 26, 2021
Rainbow Bagels for GBBO Week 3

Rainbow bagels. I was really hoping this wouldn’t be the challenge, but what can you do? As a Jewish New Yorker, I take bagels pretty seriously. The rainbow bagel is a goofy gimmick that really doesn’t need to exist. To put this in perspective, I object to the cinnamon raisin bagel (much to my wife’s dismay). But a challenge is a challenge, so I made them. It didn’t go all that well.

Rainbow Bagels.. I Guess

I Can Make Bagels

For the record, I know how to make bagels. I’ve never posted them before on the blog, but it’s something I make somewhat regularly, with much better results than the above imply. For example, here is a previous batch..

Less Horrible Bagels

Perfect? No. But way better. The process for rainbow bagels is basically make the dough as you would normally, then divide it into 6 parts and dye each part a different color. This was my first challenge, this isn’t buttercream. Working the color in to the dough was very difficult, and a huge mess. The net step I’ve seen done two different ways. On GBBO they made 6 strands and sort of braided them together. Some folks recommend flattening out the 6 pieces and stacking them then kind of forming a circle and twisting it. I did a bit of a combo of the two which sort of turned in to just mashing it all together because I could not get the 6 pieces to reincorporate and attach very well. So you end up with this..

Unidentified Yeasty Object

I think you could best describe what I made as what a bagel would look like if you ate it while on acid. The good news is, they tasted just fine. They were a bit weird to eat because of the construction issues from the dough(s), but they were pretty decent to eat. That being said, next time I make bagels I won’t be doing the rainbow variation.

January 7, 2021
Battenberg Cake with Matcha and Ground Cherry

This Matcha and Ground Cherry Battenberg Cake was a bit over the top, but it was a sort of wedding cake, so it was justified. First of all, this was actually the week one bake along for GBBO. I spaced out and forgot that florentines were actually week two.

Battenberg Cake

A few days before the battenberg cake challenge was assigned my wife and I attended her cousin’s zoom wedding. The following weekend the newly married couple came over to my in-laws house and we all had an outdoor socially distanced celebration of the wedding. I made this cake to bring for the celebration.

I’ve made a standard 2×2 battenberg in the past and I knew it wouldn’t be big enough, so I went with a 3×3 checkerboard. I also went fancier than normal on the decorations for the occasion, trying my first quilted cake effect.

So How do you make a Battenberg Cake?

I’m terrible at taking in progress photos, but I did remember to snap a picture of my battenberg pan in action. If you’ve ever wondered how you pull this effect off, this is it..

Battenberg Pan

It’s a pan with dividers you can add allowing you to bake multiple “bars” of cake in different colors. Since I went 3×3 I actually had to bake 3 batches (I just picked the 9 nicest bars for the cake. For the white bars, I used standard vanilla cake. For the green, I used this matcha chiffon cake recipe. No color was needed because the matcha provides a nice green color on its own.

For between the pieces of the grid, and around the outside of the assembled cake, I made a ground cherry jam. We had received a few pints of ground cherries from our farm share recently. This jam was the perfect opportunity to use them for something.

The Final Effect

Here you can see the finished effect of a cut slice..

Sliced Battenberg

..yeah, it’s not perfect, but the grid effect is still pretty striking. I bought a spiky wheel tool and followed assorted youtube tutorials to get the quilted effect. Then I just finished with some candy jewels and flowers I had on hand. I suck at covering cakes in marzipan and it looked sloppy. To clean it up I rolled out a long flat collar which I wrapped around the already covered cake. This means the sides have 2 layers or marzipan, which if I’m honest, was too much. It did make the cake look much better though.

The cake was a huge success with the crowd. It turns out the newlyweds were fans of GBBO as well, so they knew exactly what a battenberg was and were thrilled to try one. Much cake and champagne were consumed and a good time was had by all!

December 12, 2020
Florentines for GBBO Week 1

Florentines for the Great British Bake Off week one bake-along challenge. In case you missed my earlier post, I’m participating in a Facebook group that is baking along with this season of GBBO. Every week the moderator chooses one of the three rounds as our challenge. I felt like this was a bit of a slow start, but ok, it’s good to warm up before getting into crazier bakes.

Florentines

I went straight traditional, following Mary Berry’s recipe. The only change was, I didn’t have any candied peel, or oranges to peel and candy, so I just used more craisins in place of the peel.

They came out… fine. I have to say, they aren’t really my style of cookie. They were tasty, I mean, there’s plenty of sugar and chocolate enough that how bad could they be? To be honest, they probably aren’t something I’d make again unless requested.

Florentines

November 22, 2020