October Daring Bakers Challenge 4

This month's Daring Bakers' challenge is Pizza and Toppings. The Pizza recipe is Peter Reinhart's Pizza Napoletana which I had made a few times in the past and then a combination of sauce and toppings on top.

I was pleasantly surprised that this is this month's challenge. I love this pizza recipe, in fact this is the only pizza recipe that I bake. It is very easy to work with and the resulting pizza is just divine! It is perfectly crunchy and chewy, and it does not get soggy with the sauce and the toppings.

Making the dough, I started with combining the dry ingredients together and then slowly adding the cold wet ingredients. Having the water cold is a key factor. I then mixed the dough until everything is combined and starts to form a ball. Afterwhich, I kneaded it with the dough hook attachment until it is smooth but still sticky. Then I kneaded it for 2 minutes with hand. Cold hands for kneading is also important. When my hand started to get warm, I run it with cold water. At this point, I divided the dough into 6 pieces, lightly spraying each with oil before wrapping with plastic and then I made it rest in the fridge overnight.

The next day before using it, I took it out of the fridge 2 hours before baking to let it rise. Once the dough has risen, I attempted a toss but ended up rolling the dough. LOL! I rolled the dough in a sheet pan and baked it at almost 500F. After 5 minutes, I took it out and then I placed my sauce and toppings. For the sauce, I used a tomato sauce. I mixed a few teaspoons of lemon juice, spices like oregano, thyme and parsley, dash of garlic salt and pepper. For the toppings, I added some ground beef, green bell pepper, onions, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes and lots of mozzarella cheese. It was so delicious!

Here's how the pizza looked like.


And here's a fuzzy picture of me attempting a toss!

Breakfast Cinnamon Rolls

These are Cinnamon Rolls that I made for breakfast over the weekend, some topped with Cream Cheese Frosting and others with Caramel Frosting.
I made the rolls the night before and left it to rise overnight. The next morning, the rolls have risen quite well and I baked it at 425F for 10minutes. Afterwards, I topped it with the frosting and voila, I have some freshly baked pastry for breakfast. With some hot chocolate, breakfast was perfect.

August Daring Bakers Challenge 2

The challenge for this month is Chocolate Eclairs by Pierre Herme. I have not made eclairs before and the August challenge is my first time making some. The challenge consists of 3 elements, the Pate a Choux or the Cream Puff Dough, Pastry Cream and Chocolate Glaze.

Having no prior experience to making eclairs or cream puffs, I was actually scared of making the eclairs especially after seeing that making it requires boiling the liquid ingredients first then adding the dry ingredients. I don't know when to add the dry ingredients, I don't know how the dough will look like afterwards and such concerns. I kept reading notes before attempting on making the eclairs but I guess experience is the best way to learn it. Also because of having no eclair experience, I followed the recipe to the tee.

I started boiling the milk, butter and water together on medium heat and once it got to a rolling boil, I added the dry ingredients consisting of flour, sugar and salt. Then I mixed it until smooth for 3 minutes while still on medium heat. Then I took it out of the heat onto the mixing bowl and beat it with paddle for 3 minutes until it was cool enough. I then added 5 eggs, one at a time, adding the next one only after the previous was well combined. Then that's it, that's my dough. I now piped the dough onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, about 3 inches long, 2 inches apart. I baked the eclairs at 375F for 7 minutes, and then after 7 minutes, I slipped a wooden spoon in the oven to keep it ajar, then rotated the pan when it was already in the oven for 12 minutes. I took it out after a total of 20 minutes in the oven.

Once taken out, my first batch lost its fluff, flattened out and got soggy in the middle. I was disheartened. I had never had such a baking disaster in the recent past. Nevertheless, the soggy eclairs were still very tasty. I was planning on leaving the eclairs for the day and give it a try some other time, but I can't get it out of my head. After an hour of reading about possible mishaps and thinking of what could have gone wrong, I was back in the kitchen for my second eclair attempt. I did everything all over again but baked it all throughout with the oven door closed all the time. It was at 375F for the first 7 minutes, and then I lowered it to 350F for the rest of the 20 minutes. Once baked, I turned off the oven, opened the door and let the eclairs cool there for 20 minutes. All the while, I kept checking if the eclairs will sink again to see where it will start to flatten again just in case I fail again. It didn't. I took it out after 20 minutes, transferred to a cake rack and cooled it completely. Here's how it looked like:

While the eclairs were cooling down, I prepared some mocha cream filling and chocolate glaze. Preparing these two went uneventful. I then filled the eclairs with the mocha cream filling and glazed the topped with the chocolate glaze. Once prepared, Manny and I sampled it and it was so delicious! Good thing it was at an odd hour that we ate it, or else we'll be skipping dinner again.

What's not to like? Eclair, good. Chocolate glaze, good. Mocha cream filing, good. :)

Useful notes:

• In Baking911, Sarah Philips has a very informative page on eclairs (and pastries in general). See her Pastry101 page.



• Pate a Choux, as I found out from Wiki, is "a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, eclairs, French crullers, beignets, Indonesian kue sus, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs. Its raising agent is the high moisture content, which creates steam during cooking, puffing out the pastry".

Pecanbons

I made these pecanbons about a week ago but was just unable to blog because I was dead busy at work. I baked these last weekend with the thought of having something to eat during the busy days but then, we finished the cinnamon rolls over the weekend!
These are cinnamon rolls topped with caramel sauce and garnished with chopped pecan nuts. These were to die for. Last Saturday, we were so busy working that we ended up eating the rolls for lunch and dinner.

Cinnamon Rolls

Back in the days when life was simple, Fridays were normally dinner in Makati, cinnamon rolls and lemonade in Cinnzeo and Hot White Mocha in Starbucks to shake of the sleepiness. I remember us Intel jologs with our heavy bags and office laptops scouring through Greenbelt just for that and have those long talks and make fun of each other. I also had very good Cinnabon memories always having the classic rolls at Podium, always bringing something for my mom as I used to always drive by it back then before going home to Antipolo. The last time I had cinnamon rolls was a month ago at Cinnabon in Mecca Mall in Amman. Since then, I had always been craving for it and there is nowhere here in Israel where I could find anything like it. And as always, I braved to make it myself.
I was not able to find a definitive recipe in the web so I again combined what I feel is the best out of each recipe. There are three components to the rolls, first is the bread roll, second is the cinnamon filling and third is the cream cheese frosting. Making the bread is tricky, I kneaded to combine yeast, sugar, salt, milk and flour, then knead it for 10mins and let it rise until the dough has doubled. It took about an hour for the bread to rise to double its size. After which I rolled out the dough into the square 9x13 baking baking, then covered it with generous cinnamon filling (brown sugar, melted butter and lots of cinnamon), then I folded it into dough rolls which I then cut into serving sized breads. And then I let it rise again until each rolls doubled up which took about another hour. After that, I just baked it for 18mins until it is golden brown, took it out and smudged it all over with cream cheese frosting. It was sooo good! I even amazed myself at how it tasted! We have not even finished it yet and Manny wanted me to make new batches already! But as they say, eat it today, wear it tomorrow. Holy smokes, there goes my diet.

My Pandesal

If I were in the Philippines, it would be very impractical to bake my own Pandesal because it is sold in every corner. Pandesal sa Pugon was just very near our house and regardless of what we had for breakfast back home, there would always be Pandesal. Even Creamy (my dog) has his share of Pandesal every morning (but he's on a diet now, so no Pandesal for him in the meantime).
I had been craving for Pandesal for ages and I had been looking for a recipe so that I could make it on my own. I found several recipes, but since all of these recipes uses evaporated milk, I would always just ditch it because I cannot find any evaporated milk sold here in Israel. I decided to try replacing the evaporated milk with regular whole milk and see what will happen. There's no harm in trying. So last night, I made sure that I had all the ingredients at hand so that I would make Pandesal first thing in the morning for breakfast. But lo and behold, I woke up at 1pm! Technically, it would still be my breakfast since it's my first meal so I still decided to bake the bread. After much ado, I went to my kitchen and started preparing the dough. It's just a combination of very small amounts of milk, sugar, butter, yeast and flour plus other leaveners. After combining the ingredients, I left it on the stand mixer on kneading mode for 15mins. After kneading, I left it for another 15mins again so that the dough would double up in size. Once the dough was double its size, I used an ice cream scoop to make the individual Pandesal. My small recipe yielded 15 pieces. After baking it for 10mins, I have my freshly baked, golden brown Pandesal! I opened a Spam, made some fluffy scrambled eggs and opened a can of Reno to go with the bread. I know it's too much but I just had to taste all of it all at once! :) Manny and I never got to finish everything though, it was very heavy and filling. The Pandesal tasted like a real one (but it's real anyway! :D), and it was crunchy on the outside but soft inside.