Thursday, August 26, 2010

Peach Cobbler

Music-The Presidents of the USA-The Presidents of the USA

I thought this album would be fit for Peach Cobbler. Cause peaches come from a can and they were put there by a man!

Baking-Peach Cobbler
MILLIONS OF PEACHES! PEACHES FOR ME!


Now this is a simple yet delicious recipe half of which will be dedicated to make Bishops Peach Cobbler Ice Cream. Lets get down to cobbling. Okay so the first step would be to make the dough. Dough isn't that hard.

226 g of All Purpose Flour
2.3 g of Salt
75 g of Chilled Butter and Chilled Shortening both cut into small chunks
80 mL of Cold Water

So combine Flour and salt, then mix together chilled butter and shortening into the flour and salt until pea zie nuggets form in the mix. Then add water all at once and continue to mix until the dough comes together. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for like 30 minutes. Now you gotta make sure the butter and shortening is cold or else it will melt while you are mixing! and that is bad news cause then your dough is ganna be soft and nasty instead of nice and crisp.


Now its time for the Peach part of the formula. This is easy just cut enough peaches to fill up a 13 x 9 in. pan. Yea i wasn't super specific with this one i just kinda eye balled it. with a ball and an eye. Anyway cut the peaches into slices and then in a bowl mix in 175 g of sugar and 54 g of cornstarch and it should turn into a nice semi viscous peach mix. yes i used the word viscous. then pour the peaches into the 9 by 13, roll our the dough to cover the pan and bake at like 350 until the crust lightly browns about 30 minutes? i wasn't really paying attention to the time rather i paid attention to the brownyness of the dough.
Peaches with Sugar and Cornstarch
ALL MIXED UP IN THE MOMENT!
Poured into the Pan
Clothed and Covered
BAKED OUT OF ITS MIND!

MILLIONS OF PEACHES! PEACHES FOR FREE!

Friday, August 20, 2010

Cherry Half Pockets



Music-Alice in Chains-Greatest Hits

These guys are great. All those heavy angry guitar riffs really inspire me to make my pastries more beautiful and elegant. I wonder who Alice was and why she was in chains.
Feed my eyes, can you sew them shut?

Baking-Cherry Half Pockets with Apricot Glaze

So these delicious things are very delicious. The hardest part about making the pockets was the dough since the dough was laminated. I've never really made a laminated dough before so making the layers of butter was very interesting. Laminated is a funny word huh? when i think of a laminated dough i think of rolling out the dough really thin and putting it through a laminating machine.that way the dough stays nice and shiny forever. Anyway the type of laminated dough i used was Danish Dough. Similar to Croissant dough but with eggs in the dough. To make this beautiful dough I mixed these ingredients together
1)     181 g Bread Flour
2)     20.6 g Sugar
3)     2.8 Instant dry yeast
4)     2.8 g Salt
5)     17g Butter
6)     36.9 g Eggs
7)     84 ml Milk
 then when the dough was non-sticky enough I put it out to a work surface and kneaded it. Then covered and let it rest for about 2 hours.
Afterward Molly Smith AKA Brunette Baking Babe AKA Triple B came and helped me out on making this dough laminated. To do this I got one and a half sticks of cold butter, put them between two sheets of wax paper and pounded/rolled it out into a medium sized rectangle (approx 12 x 16 inches). I pounded it out on a cookie sheet that had been refrigerated so the butter wouldn’t melt on me. This sheet of butter is now going to be called the roll-in cause that’s what the Culinary Institute of America refers to it as. Anyway I rolled out the dough to a rectangle a bit larger than the roll-in and placed the roll in on top of the dough. I then folded the dough in half and then rolled it out again back to its original size, that way the roll-in is inbetween the dough. Them I proceeded to administer a four-fold to the dough, refrigerated for a bit, administered a threefold, refrigerated for a bit, and finally one last three fold. So the three fold I talked about before, a fourfold is kinda the same expect the dough is folded 3 times instead of twice to make four layers. Anyway after all these folds your dough is laminated! Refrigerate again for a bit to make sure butter does not melt 
Rolling out the dough for the Roll-in
Administering one of the folds!
Dough after one of the trifolds or the four fold

After I prepared the cherry filling. To make cherry filling you first combine  14 g of tapioca starch and 28 g of cornstarch with as much water from 180 ml as you need to make a “slurry”. Then I combined:
1.      1g of nutmeg
2.      1 g of cinnamon
3.      1 tsp of lemon juice
4.      142 g of sugar
5.      ¼ tsp of salt
6.      Remaining water from the original 180 ml
In a sauce pan and waited for it to boil stirring constantly. After bringing to a boil add the starch slurry and then bring that to a boil stirring constantly. Then I added like 2 lbs of cherries or something like that. Just a lot of cherries and make sure they are pitted and what not. After the cherries have been in there for a bit and they are nice and gooey add in 2 tsp of butter and let that melt and mix. Then wait for it too cool off.
Cherry filling!

After I took the dough out of the fridge and rolled it out into approximately a 12 x 16 in rectangle and cut it into 12 pieces. Brushed lightly with egg wash and dabble some cherry goodness in the middle of each piece. Fold one end of each piece over to cover the filling and press on the edges to seal. Here John Evangelista helped out with the cherry filling filling. Brush each folded piece with egg wash again and then bake for 17 minutes at 375.
UNBAKED
UNBAKED

Then when its bake prepare an apricot glaze by mixing 9 oz of apricot jam with 6 oz of water and 9 more oz of corn syrup. Bring that to a boil and brush it on the baked pockets while they are still hot!
Holy Cherry Checkers Batman those look delectable!

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Pizza

Music-Alan Rose and the Restless Elements-American Hands

My former band leader and not former friends new album which he had been working on for at least 8 years. Those 8 years have really paid off seeing how this album is really really good.


Baking-Pizza


So if you guys recall my previous post i stated how putting the jam on Rugelachs was similar to putting tomato sauce on pizza? Well as it turns out from my first pizza making experience it is. making pizza is fun, easy and hard to mess up. But getting the dough to be a nice even circle is pretty hard. I think that was the most difficult part of making the pizza. Anyway onward and upward to pizza and beyond! 

So we started out by making the dough. We used the Joy of Cooking recipe to make the Pizza dough. This is pretty easy. all you gotta do is let one package of yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons) sit in 1 1/3 cups of warm water for like 5 minutes. Then add 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of salt and 3 1/2 cups of flour and mix until kneadable and then knead. After kneading for a while cover in plastic wrap and let it sit for about 1- 1 1/2 hours or until the dough doubles in size.

After came the  stretching and tossing and what not. This part is very very hard and kind of intuitive so im not ganna try to explain cause im not good at this at all. My friends were pretty good at it though. The annoying thing about pizza dough or dough in general is that if you mess up you can't put the dough back into a ball and restretch it. Instead you kinda have to repair the holes and stuff.which sucks. a lot.
Guest Chef Malinka using his magic hands
The two other not so circular pizzas

after stretching it out into nice flat circles or things that resemble circles we got a can of diced tomatoes, added some oregano and pepper and blended it into a sauce (we didn't have any tomato sauce on us at the time so we just used diced tomatoes) and spread it over the pizza. Then we sliced up some Mozzarella and Tomatoes and basil and put those on as well. We did really measure anything out here we just kinda did it by eye. Then 450 in the oven for like 15 minutes. I have provided pictures for more clarity.
Tomato sauce first!
Then Mozzarella!
Then sliced Tomatoes and Basil!
Then the Oven at 450!
HOLY OBESITY BATMAN IS THAT PIZZA?


Oh yea you guys should check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85LUuF6ZXaU&feature=related

Monday, August 9, 2010

Black Magic Chocolate Cake


I know this blog is called Buffalo Baked, but I have to contribute something which was, alas, not concocted in the big blue house.

Earlier this week, I traveled home to the backwoods of Pennsylvania to savor some good old fashioned Pennsylvania fun; the local county fair. Every year for the past three years, I have entered the fair's Hershey Chocolate Cake contest. The rules are simple; bake a cake which uses at least 1/4 cup of Hershey's cocoa in the cake (same for frosting if it is chocolate). It can be any kind of cake and any kind of frosting. I've received honorable mentions before and last year got 3rd place, but am always bested by one M. McKinley. This year, determined to outdo Ms. McKinley, I baked a Black Magic Chocolate cake with Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate frosting, complete with chocolate frosting roses. Read/see on for my baking adventures!

Music: Whatever was on Black Cab Sessions (really good set by Death Cab for Cutie and The National)

Company: My mom's cat Sputnik was quite curious as to my activities, but more interested in the goings on of the various chickens outside and abandoned me after I wouldn't let him lick the bowl (I had dibs).

While most of the time when I bake I use the recipe mainly as a guideline and improvise my way through it, I thought it best, on this occasion, to adhere to the directions as strictly as possible.

I started out baking the cake by heating my oven to 350 degrees F. Next, I mixed two cups of white sugar, 1 3/4 cups of cake flour (all-purpose would have worked, but cake flour comes pre-sifted and can result in a lighter cake), 3/4 cup Hershey's special dark cocoa, 2 teaspoons of baking soda, 1 teaspoon of baking powder and 1 teaspoon of salt. Most recipes recommend stirring ingredients with a wooden spoon, but I rarely use one, favoring instead an old wire whisk purchased from an Amish variety store. It's much sturdier than ones you can get in stores these days and functions as an in-bowl sifter. The resulting mixture had the consistency of very fine silt.

Next, I added two eggs, 1 cup of strong coffee (I brewed a cup then ran it through the filter again to make it stronger), 1/2 cup of vegetable oil, 1 teaspoon of vanilla and 1 cup of sour milk (to sour milk, put 1 tablespoon of vinegar in a measuring cup and add enough milk to equal 1 cup). At this juncture, I was supposed to beat for two minutes with an electric hand-mixer, but my dear sister took my mixer with her to school so I was forced to whip the batter with a fork for a few minutes instead. Still, the desired result occurred and the batter, while thin, was light and full of bubbles. I poured the batter into two, 9-inch round, greased and floured baking tins and put them in the oven for exactly 35 minutes, at which point I took them out and allowed them to cool in the pans.

After they had cooled, I found the cakes had risen far above the rim of the pan. Since any attempt to stack them one on top of the other would have resulted in the top cake splitting, I took a bread knife and carefully sawed off the excess cake from each one so they were perfectly flat and uniform. I could then remove the cakes from the pan and let cool completely upside-down on wire racks. However, this measure resulted in a lot of excess crumbs on top of the cake, which I eliminated with gentle dabs with a damp paper towel.













Next, I made the frosting by melting 1 stick (1/2 cup) of butter, adding 1/3 cup of Hershey's cocoa and beating until smooth. Then, I alternately added 3 cups of confectioners sugar with 1/3 cup of milk and 1 teaspoon of vanilla. Getting the consistency right was difficult and I made adjustments to both sugar and milk until the frosting was about right. Since it needs to be whipped with a beater and I didn't have one, I used an egg beater with moderate success and a sore arm.

To assemble, I spread chocolate frosting over the top of one cake to a depth of about 1/3-1/2 inch. Then, I flipped the other cake on top and proceeded to spread frosting on the top and sides of both. With very fine and delicate cakes like these, it's very hard to spread thick frosting without getting crumbs everywhere. My trick is, I get a cup of boiling water and periodically, dip my frosting knife in it, so it heats up pretty hot. This melts the frosting just enough to make it easier to spread and so it doesn't stick to the wrong places on the cake.
Frosted in the middle. The very rough nature of the surface of the cake indicates lots of bubbles and a light texture.

Once fully coated in frosting, I took mini chocolate chips (Hershey's, of course) and pressed them to the sides of the cake. Then, I put the cake in the refrigerator for a while so the chips would harden into the frosting.

The next morning, I whipped up a quick extra batch of frosting and made some chocolate roses to go on top of the cake for decorations. Each rose was centered around a Hershey Kiss center!

A rose in progress! Usually I use a flower nail to form it on, but didn't have one, so I used a meat thermometer covered in tin foil!

Completed cake!

I found out this afternoon that I placed 3rd with my cake again. M. McKinley beat me again! However, she did NOT place first, as she has every other year I have competed so I feel pretty ok. The cake sold at auction for $25, the proceeds of which went to the Clinton County Fair fund.

From the scraps of cake I got to sample while baking it, this is really a killer one. The coffee flavor isn't really discernible, but more enhances the dark chocolate-ness of the cake. I really want to try making cupcakes with this recipe and maybe using a white frosting instead of a chocolate one. Oooo, it would be really good with cherries too!

Friday, August 6, 2010

Vegan Chewy Chocolate Cookies with Slivered Almonds

Music-
Blackbird Special by Dirty Dozen Brass Band
This is just a great song by a great New Orleans brass band. I don’t think any of them are vegans (because who would want to be a vegan in New Orleans), but you never know. I’m sure they like chocolate at least and I’m sure they would enjoy these cookies.

Baking-
The other night was the house’s first venture into vegan baking. Why go there? Well we have friends who are vegans and they are sad when they cannot enjoy our delicious baked goods. So we made something especially for them!

Back when everyone lived in JAM, an awesome Ithaca band, Mutron Warriors, came to play in our dorm. Mike and I made cookies for lots of the concerts, and we heard that the sax player was a vegan, so we threw together these vegan cookies for him. We had found the recipe online, when searching for a recipe that didn’t use tricky ‘vegan’ ingredients like flax seeds or almond flour. We didn’t have these ingredients then, and we don’t have them now, so the recipe came through for us yet again!


First we combined the dry ingredients – 2 cups of flour, 3/4 cup of Dutch processed cocoa powder, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt. While I did that, Mike attempted to ‘cream’ 3/4 cup of canola oil with 2 cups of sugar. Now, creaming oil is not like creaming butter (oil doesn’t cream), but we just turned a blind eye and kept going. Mike then added 1/2 cup of soymilk and 2 teaspoons of vanilla.

Next came the fun part. Folding! We folded the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients, adding the dry ingredients in thirds as instructed by “Baking and Pastry,” the baking bible mentioned (revered? worshiped?) in previous posts. At this point the dough basically looked and tasted just like brownie batter. We added some slivered almonds for mostly aesthetic reasons and then plopped the batter on cookie sheets. We tossed them in the 350 degree oven for 10-15 minutes
.

We then argued about whether they were done or not – they were gooey from start to finish. But, since there were no eggs, we figured as long as they would hold together in the time it takes to lift one from the plate to eat it, they were done.

The cookies tasted pretty much like tasty, chewy Oreo’s, and the almonds were an especially good addition. Everyone, vegans and non-vegans alike, was happy and well fed!

-Laura Schwartz

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Raspberry Rugelachs

Music-Alicia Keys- Songs in A Minor

Amazing singing. cool dreary piano riffs and solid drum beats. Alicia Keys is a genius of her field!

Baking-

So we baked Rugelach last night and it was awesome. This is a very fun cookie to make cause you have to make the dough and flatten it out and spread cinnamon sugar and Raspberry jam on it like you spread tomato sauce on a pizza! very fun to make! I don't think i have actually made a pizza before though so i don't think i can make that claim. maybe spreading tomato sauce on pizza is nothing like i imagine it to be. alright i'll keep thinking  and get back to you later about that. right now i'll tell you how i made these seriously savory sweet swirls of raspberry.

These were gone by midnight


First we sifted together 160 grams of bread flour, 32 grams of all purpose flour, and a pinch of salt and sat it aside. It sat and waited. while it sat I mixed 200 grams of butter with 160 grams of cream cheese until smooth. then on low speed I slowly mixed in the sifted dry ingredients. Now its pretty humid right now in Ithaca so the dough ended up being very wet and a bit hard to work with but thats okay. Dough i love you no matter how wet and hard to work with you are. we'll get through this together.


We turned the dough out on a work surface, rolled it out into a rectangle with about a 1cm thickness and gave it a tri-fold. now do you know what a tri-fold is? cause i didn't. so  "Baking and Pastry", a textbook of the Culinary Institute of America, told me to see page 263 and i proceeded to flip to page 263. apparently its just folding the rectangular sheet of dough twice to form 3 layers of dough.
Administering the TRI-FOLD


We then wrapped it in plastic wrap and refrigerated it until it was ready to be molded and what not. So then we waited. While we waited we ate a bit of dinner. but thats not interesting. after we decided it was cool enough to roll out and about we rolled it out and about into a circle about 1.5 mm in thickness. We then sprinkled it with some cinnamon sugar until we thought there was enough. Afterward we eyeballed an appropriate amount of raspberry jam and spread it all over the cookie dough pizza. Finally we sprinkled 101.3 grams of chopped walnuts.
spreading out the dough into a round circle
sliced unrolled Rugelach with cinnamon sugar, walnuts, and raspberry jam

Brushing the Rugelach with eggwash

We then sliced it up like pizza slices and rolled up each one from the wide end, sat them on the the baking pan, brushed them with egg wash, and baked them for 10 minutes at 375 degrees. They turned out pretty delicious. The annoying thing was that the oven is a bad person so he wouldn't go up to 375 and stayed at 350 so we had to bake them for like 20 minutes. it didn't really make the rugelachs less delicious but some raspberry jam leaked out. Its okay though. i don't care how you look rugelach. its whats on the inside that counts. and thats raspberry. well i guess the rapsberry leaked out a bit. hrm.
Raspberry Rugelach with Vanilla Ice Cream



-Michael Liu

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Cookies and Strudels

 So this is the first post of Buffalo Baked! well...kind of. I have two things to say to the post before this one: I do not poop my pants and i know for a fact that Ryan Bishop wears diapers. used Gorilla diapers.

Music- John Fahey and His Orchestra- Of Rivers and Religion  

Baking-Well yesterday was a very  very productive baking day. I baked two concoctions of tongue tingling tastiness.

First of the two was Cranberry Oatmeal Dark, White, Milk Chocolate Chip cookies which we used to make ice cream sandwiches. very yummy. Looking at the recipe I honestly thought there was going to be way too many chips and fruits and oatmeal and whatnot. but it turned out alright. there wasn't too much of one thing and the cookie turned out great. surprise surprise. The recipe was actually taken from another blog Cherry Tea Cakes. The girl who writes that blog really knows how to bake.

The Ice Cream Sandwich with a glass of Skim Milk























Now for the second and more awesome creation of the night. With the help of my friends Laura Schwartz and Brian Sherman we made Apple Strudel! A very delicious mixture of Granny Smith Apples tossed with Cinnamon Sugar and Raisins is rolled up along a very very thin sheet of Strudel dough. oh boy can you say exciting? exciting!

So anyway I started out with making the strudel dough by mixing a pound of sifted Bread Flour with about one and a half teaspoon of salt and mixing it with 13 fluid ounces of water and 2.5 fluid ounces of vegetable oil. Now the super hard part about this was the mixing and kneading. the dough was really wet and like...gloppy. I think gloppy is a really good description of the texture. Anyway it was difficult to knead so I referred the Brian for some advice. We ended adding more and more flour during the awkward kneading process until it would stop being so sticky. anyway after the dough was properly kneaded i rolled it into a ball brushed it with vegetable oil and wrapped it up to let it rest for about an hour.



The next step was cutting and coring the Granny Smith apples (which i am forever in debt with Laura for helping me core peel and cut). 5 pounds of Granny Smith apples was cored and peeled and cut and then tossed with 8 oz of cinnamon sugar and 6 ounces of raisins.

looks delicious? oh you bet.

After came the bread crumbs which was just 6 ounces of bread crumbs tossed with half a stick of butter.

So then I, with the help of Brian Sherman and Laura Schwartz, rolled out the dough into approximately a
12 in by 18 in rectangle, let it rest for 15 minutes. And then  stretched it out by hand until the dough was almost transparent. Then came brushing the surface of the dough with melted butter and sprinkling the bread crumbs.
Stretching the Strudel Dough

Afterward we placed the apple mixture in a strip along one of the edges of the dough and carefully we rolled up the dough around the apple mixture forming a tight log. the strudel was then brushed with more melted butter and slits were cut along the top of the strudel to allow the strudel to vent off the excess moisture.

Rolling the Strudel


APPLE STRUDEL
Kinda looks like a mummy or something huh?
-Michael Liu

EXTRA! EXTRA! READ ALL ABOUT IT!

LIU POOPS HIS PANTS AND THERE'S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT
-Ryan Bishop