Sponge Cake Roll With Raspberry Whipped Cream

I really love the joy of baking website and have made recipes from it many times. This time, I chose to make a sponge cake roll filled with raspberry whipped cream. I knew that it would turn out well, because I tried the joy of baking website's pumpkin roll with cream cheese filling and found it to be wonderful, spongy, and moist!

The sponge cake for this recipe does include different technique than the pumpkin roll, however, because you have to whip your egg yolks and egg whites separately. This makes the recipe more time consuming, but results in a really light cake that bakes in 6-8 minutes.

The whipped cream is really simple to make if you have a mixer. I love that it uses raspberry jam for colour and flavour, but thought it could use some fresh raspberries. Since I had some raspberries in the fridge, I decided to layer some over top of the cream before rolling the cake up. This added some nice freshness to the roll.

Orange Macarons With Blood Orange Caramel

Mmmm Macarons! These are not macaroons which are a chewy coconut cookie, but rather macarons (see the difference of spelling?) which are two meringue cookies that have a flavourful filling squished between them. I've eaten them on a few different occasions, once at a craft show, and another time at a patisserie in the Distillery District of Toronto, and am always struck first by their texture rather than their flavour. The Macarons I've eaten before are usually raspberry meringue shells with a raspberry cream in the center or lemon ones with a lemon cream center, but none of them ever imparted natural fruit flavour. The meringue texture is very good though, because you bite into it getting a slight crunch and then it melts in your mouth like candy.

For my first-ever attempt at making macarons (a difficult feat) I decided to make orange shells with a blood orange caramel from the book "Les Petits Macarons". I started with the blood orange caramel because I figured that was something I could not screw up. Indeed, it turned out really thick, tasty, a beautiful red-brown colour, and easy to pipe onto the finished meringue cookie. The only thing I might do differently next time is to omit the orange zest, because I thought once it hit the heat it left a bitter finish to the caramel.

I chose to work with the Italian method of making meringues, because it looked the most straightforward to do. Part of the big issue of making the meringue, according to the book, is whipping the meringue too long or for not long enough. Apparently if you whip too long, your cookies won't form feet at the bottom.

My macarons did not form feet, but there are numerous reasons why this could be. When whipping the meringue, it got to the consistency where it would not move in the bowl (which is described in the book), but after getting incorporated with the almond mixture, the batter loosened up a lot. When adding the meringue to the almond mixture, the book says to use a pasta method to incorporate the ingredients. I would have thought that folding the ingredients would be better so as to incorporate air into the mixture.

Whatever the issue, I think that I made an admirable first attempt at making macarons. Next time, I will try pistachio shells with a chocolate ganache filling.

Other Christmas Baking.........

I know, I know! It's the middle of January, but I took some pictures of some spectacular baking that I did for Christmas and figured that while some of it looks or tastes extremely festive, one can really make these things all year round. Here, I present to you Panforte, Linzer cookies, and Sticky Toffee Pudding.

Panforte

Panforte, or Italian Christmas Cake as it is sometimes called, is a confection that originated in the Middle Ages. Panforte translates to strong bread which might refer to the heavy spicing of it or to the density. Apparently Crusaders and Pilgrims used to carry this bread due to its high nutrition and ability to keep for a long time. Although the original recipe is not known, it is believed that Panforte traditionally consisted of a combination of nuts, fruit, honey, and spices. Modern recipes include all these things, but also include some kind of chocolate, which did not exist in the Medieval European world.

The recipe I used is from the joy of baking website, and includes citrus, almonds, hazlenuts, cinnamon, semisweet chocolate, cocoa powder, sugar, and honey. It was a simple recipe to make, because you melt the chocolate, create a honey/sugar sirop on the stove, toast the nuts, and then combine everything together, spread it in a pan, and bake it off. The result was intriguing and delicious, because it becomes more of a confection than a bread, and is heavily flavoured with citrus and cinnamon. On Christmas day, my family found it really interesting and everyone tried it!

Linzer Cookies

These Linzer cookies are one of my favourite things to make for Christmas and this is the second year I have made them. They are basically sandwich cookies that usually consist of ground almonds and some sort of jam in the middle. For these, cinnamon and lemon zest are also added for flavouring. Since my sister and I love raspberry jam so much, we used that for the filling.

You can purchase Linzer cookie cutters from a store like Bulk Barn, which allows you to cut out one solid cookie for the bottom of the sandwich, and a cookie with a shape for the top. We purchased Christmas ones that have shapes like a Christmas tree, candy cane, angel, star, and snowman. To finish, you can dust them with confectioners' sugar. If you would like to make these too, check out the joy of baking website where I found the recipe.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

The Earth to Table book includes a terrific recipe for Sticky Toffee Pudding with a caramel sauce that I tried a couple weeks before Christmas. The recipe included medjool dates that were boiled until tender, and then pureed in the food processor before being mixed with all the other ingredients. I baked them in muffin tins which allowed for nicely portioned desserts.

This was my first time successfully making a caramel sauce which looked pretty and tasted delicious. I topped them with some walnuts for extra effect.

Pork Sausage Stew

Last night, my sister and I were once again in charge of making dinner, and our mother thawed a package of ground pork sausage with the purpose of us making a stew. While I enjoy a typical beef stew, especially Julia Child's recipe for 'boeuf bourguingnon' which we made approximately a month ago, pork sausage adds a whole new depth and flavour to the common stew.

We began by preheating our oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Then we added our pork to a casserole dish with two tablespoons of flour and put it in the oven to let some of the juices render out so as to incorporate the flour. We thought that the flour added at the beginning would help to thicken the sauce, but we found we required cornstarch as a thickener at the end of the cooking time after all.

After the pork and flour step, we added a mixture of chopped parsnips, carrots, and potatoes, some sliced onions, and some shredded cabbage. We covered our mixture with a can of tomato soup and enough water to cover all the meat and vegetables, and seasoned liberally with salt and pepper, rosemary, thyme, and three bay leaves.

After setting the mixture in the oven for approximately an hour, until everything was cooked and tender, we mixed together six teaspoons of cornstarch with enough water to make it just above a paste and incorporated it into the sauce of the stew. Then all we had to do was pop it back into the oven for 10 or 15 minutes until thickened, and serve with some freshly made bread.

The result was an extremely addictive stew, because the pork meat was tender, and the carrots and cooked onions always add a nice sweetness to any soup or stew that I make. I don't typically add cabbage to my stew, but I was inspired by a cabbage stew I ate in Montreal last week called 'bigos' at Stash Cafe. I think that the cabbage adds terrific texture to a mixture that could otherwise become mush, as stews often do. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of this stew as nearly all of it was eaten in one sitting and I didn't make the stew specifically for this blog. When I make it again, I will have to be sure to get a picture.