Today I am sharing some tested recipes. I have not posted for a while. Not that I have not been cooking. Rather I did not get a chance to take photos and choose to spend time outdoors more, maybe to offset being so much on a laptop during this increased working from home period.
I have tried quite a few recipes found online, often randomly, at other times simply because I am looking up a specific ingredient. I will share a few below.
At the same time, I have changed my baguette recipe. It calls for less starter and overall is the same ratio of flour and water. Why that you may ask. I realised that my baguettes were not getting as many air pockets inside that they used to. The idea was to give the yeast more “food”. The outcome is great.
Updated baguette recipe
I bake on a weekly basis minimum. I make nine baguettes per batch. This works for me, this is the amount I can bake in one go, all on the same oven level. Some baguettes go to neighbors, others we will freeze on the day of baking and unfreeze as we need them. They come out quite surprisingly well.
The updated recipe is HERE.
Tried from scratch
I have been getting these gorgeous grape tomatoes from our weekly fruits and vegetable delivery. I was trying a way to display them in a dish where these tomatoes are the hero of the dish. The idea was to make a tomato tarte. In practice, the taste was amazing, but the bottom was too soggy the first time. The second time, I added some ricotta as a bottom layer which seemed to sponge off the juices. I also baked it at the lowest level in the oven. Get started with your version, for me, this is still a recipe in development.
Tried online recipes…and yes, all chocolate-based…
Cocoa powder biscuits
I found this recipe of cocoa cookies when looking at how to use a large quantity of cocoa powder (actually raw cacao) I have at home. This has been adopted by my children, batch four is now baking!
Oven-baked thick crepe
This was a recipe I tried for dessert for our dinner on the 14th of July. I remember getting the feed from GoodFood and being curious about this recipe. That evening, we also had snails in its parsley garlic butter as an entree! That recipe is for another day.
While crepes are a national food in France and come with regional variations, this oven-baked version is not a traditional dish. The recipe is fund and worth a try. Ours puffed up on one side which had a pretty cool effect. For the chocolate sauce, I did not do a ganache (i.e. I did not use cream), we had run out of cream. I made a water-based chocolate sauce. I think it is better for this dessert, it is lighter. I really liked the dark chocolate vs orange taste contrast.
Hazelnut chocolate torte
That chocolate hazelnut cake recipe is from BBC Food. I can’t remember how I stumbled on it. It is a similar type of cake to the one from Flour & Stone, which recipe is already on this blog and has become a favorite. It is gluten-free. Verdict: a very good cake, more compact than the Flour and Stone one and similarly rich. While I used a milk chocolate ganache for the topping, my preference is dark chocolate, just a matter of preference.
