What are You Baking the Week of February 12, 2017?

[cwcdesign]

I had seen a recipe for Homemade Milano Cookies which I decided to try yesterday since I had the 4 egg whites it called for. I had no problem making the dough, but I had problems piping the cookies p. The recipe said to cut ¼" in the corner of the bag. I found I was going back and forth over my piping to get more dough out. My cookies looked like Milano but they never crisped. The chocolate ganache was good. I took some of them to work. Everyone looked them despite their softness.

I looked at other homemade recipes and found that people cut bigger holes which makes sense. However the doughs came out much thicker in those recipes. The site I found it on has no place for comments which is frustrating. I think I'm going to research Madeleines to see if the batter is close to those.

[Mike Nolan]

I recommend you look for 'langues de chat' recipes. (Yes, that means "cat's tongue".) That's basically what the cookie part of a Milano cookie is. I haven't found the right filling recipe yet, though. Next time I'm just going to try some tempered milk chocolate. (Or maybe a mix of milk and dark chocolate.)

When you say 'cut off a corner', it sounds like you were using a ziplock bag. I find it difficult to make precise shapes that way, the bag is clumsy to hold compared to a standard pastry bag. I went to the restaurant supply store and bought a roll of disposable pastry bags in two different sizes. I just looked online, a roll of a hundred Ateco 12" pastry bags is about $10, or a dime each.

Or you can do what I've been practicing since I went to chocolate school, make pastry bags out of parchment for less than a penny. It took me about a dozen tries to get the basics worked out, and I probably need to do a few dozen more to make it nearly effortless.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Madeleines are roughly the same shape but the dough is much more of a cake then a crisp cookie.

I made scones 2/15 for Valentine's Day. My wife was away on Valentine's Day so I did some things with the kids but our celebration basically crossed two days. This week so far is English muffins, shortbread, and scones. I need to make a batch of challah and I'll try to do that tonight.

The parchment pastry-bag trick is cool. I've never mastered it but I also never thought about sitting down with a sheet of parchment and practicing. Thanks for the tip.

[Mike Nolan]

Chef Russ at chocolate school said it takes making about 100 of them for it to become effortless. (He would have them made and filled about as fast as he could talk about it.)

I spent two evenings practicing making parchment bags, enough to get the mechanics down but not enough to develop consistency or speed. I've made about a dozen of them since then, I probably need to practice some more. (I"m hoping to take Chocolate 2.0 some time in late 2017 or 2018, but I need to build up my skills and stamina first, losing some weight would help the latter.)

A trick I've seen online is to make a small tear through the layers at the top to 'lock' the shape of the bag. Folding the top down after it has been filled works well, too, and helps to keep things clean. (One thing Chef

We would store filled bags in a chocolate warmer so that they stayed tempered and didn't set.

We had large plastic piping bags available for things like piping large amounts of ganache into molds (since we were making about 16 dozen of everything), but when working with chocolate you often want smaller bags of a different type of chocolate or colored cocoa butter available for decoration or embellishments, and we had to make those ourselves, though they did have pre-cut triangles for us to use.

[cwcdesign]

Thanks Mike and Aaron. You're both right about the cookie. I went looking for recipes online - ironically, Martha Stewart had a recipe for homemade Milanos, but used a thicker cookie dough and had a recipe for langues du chat as well. The recipe I used only had egg whites as the langues du chat. The other recipes for homemade ones all had whole eggs.

The recipe I tried was definitely out of balance - 8 ounces butter, 2 cups powdered sugar (8 oz.), 4 egg whites, 1 tsp vanilla and 1 ½ cups flour. The other recipes vary but ¼ to ½ cup butter, ½ cup sugar and 1 to 1 ¼ cups flour. I'll have to play someday.

Mike, we all really liked the ganache
1 cup (6 ounces) chocolate - I used dark
½ cup heavy cream
Break up the chocolate in a heatproof bowl. Heat the cream to boiling over medium heat. Pour over chocolate and let stand 30-45 seconds. Stir well to combine.

[Mike Nolan]

Chef Russ seemed to think boiling cream produced an inferior ganache, he would heat it, but not to boiling.

I think most ganaches are too soft for Milano-like cookies, which is why I'd like to experiment with tempered chocolate. I should buy a package of Milanos and dissect them. (Yeah, that's my story for why I'm buying them.)

[Mike Nolan]

One of the things I've been doing since I retired is working on my French, primarily using the duolingo.com site. According to that site I'm 42% fluent in French now, though I'd say that's on the high side.

This afternoon, I've been doing some research online trying to figure out why references to the cookie are 'langues de chat' and not 'langues du chat' or 'langues des chat'. So far I haven't found the definitive explanation, except for perhaps 'That's just how it's done in French'. 🙂

I've misplaced the recipe I have used several times for langues de chat, but as I recall I made it with superfine baker's sugar, not powdered sugar. (Powdered sugar adds a 'cornstarch' flavor to foods.)

I'll keep looking for that recipe, it's a good one for me to do 'piping practice' with, and I haven't done much piping since Chocolate School.

[BakerAunt]

On Friday, I tried a new recipe that I had printed from the Baking Circle before KAF closed it: Sour Cream Chocolate Cookies by mreader. (I checked, and no one had posted the recipe on this site, so I've added it in the recipe section.) I realized too late that I only had unsweetened and sweetened chocolate, rather than semi-sweet. I used the unsweetened, but it really does need the semi-sweet. If I'd been thinking clearly, I would have used half of each! I may need to put some ganache on top of each cookie. I also replaced half the shortening with butter, substituted in 3/4 cup white whole wheat flour, and added 1 tsp. espresso powder. I mixed up the dough while I was at home for lunch, which was why I was a bit rushed, then refrigerated it until after dinner. I used a 1 Tbs. scoop and baked 12 at a time on parchment-lined cookie sheets for 12 minutes. That produced 45 cookies.

[BakerAunt]

We were out of bread, so on Saturday, I baked three loaves of "Grandma A's Ranch Hand Bread" (recipe posted on this site). In addition to my usual substitutions of 3 1/4 cups of buttermilk for that much milk, 3 Tbs. of honey rather than sugar, and the addition of 1/3 cup ground flax meal, I substituted in 2 cups of Irish Wholemeal Flour (I was amazed at how much I have in the freezer!) and used up 1 3/4 cups of Sir Lancelot flour as part of the bread flour.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 9 months ago by BakerAunt. Reason: fixed spelling error

[aaronatthedoublef]

BA, what is sweetened chocolate? I have unsweetened, bitter sweet, semi-sweet, and milk all with varying amounts of cocoa.

I finished up the week making KAF no-knead challah. I subbed out 1/2 cup of water for 1/2 cup of apple cider. Also, like many of the reviewers I mixed all the wet and dry ingredients separately then combined them. I found when I put the recipe together as called for by KAF I either have streaks of egg running through the dough or I had to knead the dough quite a bit. I was testing to see how big a loaf I needed before baking to end up with at least a 1 lb loaf after baking. I lose about 2.5 ounces during baking so I'll start with a 21 ounces loaf. If I bake a loaf in a pan I only lose about 1.5 ounces. All of this is in preparation for our big challah bake next weekend. I will be with the 7th and 8th grade at our religious school and we're going to make between 30 and 40 one pound loaves of challah in about two hours. Lots of prep this week.

I have some leftover shortbread dough and I was going to bake cookies and dip them in chocolate for dinner at a friends but my wife nixed it as our friends were trying to be healthful (actually it was a conspiracy of the two moms!). But I'll make those some time this week.

[luvpyrpom]

This week I decided to get back into baking bread again. And after the recent conversation of how many types of flour we have in our pantry, I thought I would try to downsize my supply. So made the KAF Harvest Grains bread and a combination of their basic and simplest muffin recipes. I made both plain and chocolate chips versions.. I'm hoping to convert the recipes to a basic mix I can just stash in the freezer and then add wet ingredients when I want to make some muffins. Like with the whole wheat pancake mix.

[BakerAunt]

Aaron--the sweet chocolate is the Baker's German Chocolate in a bar form. I think that I bought it a while back when someone at work requested German Chocolate Cake, which of course is not German but was someone's last name who sold the sweet chocolate.

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