Anthony Lombardi

I’ve made quite a few Christmas treats this holiday season. Here’s some pictures of some of them.

This is one of my family’s favorite Christmas cookies.  They’re called Wandering Jews but none of us quite know why.  We also don’t know where our grandma got the recipe.   This is one of those cookies that only gets better while it sits.  If you eat it right after baking the inside of the cookie is on the dry side, but if you wait a week or two (which is right about now) it absorbs moisture from the icing and ends up the perfect texture.

These are Rum Truffles. The recipe was from a book I just got for Christmas called Chocolate Epiphany, by Francois Payard. I noticed reading the recipe that he uses a very high chocolate to cream ratio for a non-molded chocolate. It’s 1:1. Usually for this kind of classic truffle, the ratio is much more like 2:1, but I decided to try out the recipe anyway.

The filling ended up leaking out a bit just after dipping, but I can’t blame the recipe completely since I didn’t follow it verbatim. I noticed the rum flavor wasn’t quite as pronounced as I wanted it, so before piping I stirred in 1/4 teaspoon of rum extract. With ganache, you can’t just stir it whenever you feel like though. It changes the resulting texture quite a bit, particularly when it’s been cooled to room temperature. Too much stirring results in a short texture, which is the opposite of creamy and smooth. My little deviation made the ganache so stiff that it was almost impossible to pipe out into mounds. It only really started moving after my hands warmed it through the freezer bag I used as a piping bag.

Luckily the finished texture ended up smooth and creamy and not stiff at all. If I did it again though, I think I’ll reduce the cream a bit just to be safe.

This is called a Danish Twist. The dough is a laminated dough, meaning butter is folded in several times in order to make it flaky when baked. Each type of fold is called a turn. The recipe called for one single turn (which makes 3 layers) and three double turns (which each make 4 layers) resulting in 3*4*4*4 or 192 layers of butter! I’ve made these a couple years ago as gifts, but this year they turned out flakier. I let them rise quite a bit longer than I did the first time I made them, and it seems to have made all the difference. I also turned down the oven temperature because I remember them browning quite fast the first time I made them.

I recently discovered a book called “Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day”. It really does work and produces bread just as good as any other I’ve made using more labor-intensive methods. I highly recommend it. This version is the base recipe with 1/4 of the flour replaced with whole wheat.

Ever read a recipe that calls for a certain percentage of chocolate that you don’t have? Well here’s a calculator that tells you how to substitute a chocolate of a different percentage.

ChocolateCalculator

According to Alice Medrich’s book Bittersweet, the most important thing to keep constant when substituting one percentage chocolate for another is the amount of cocoa solids in the recipe, so that’s exactly what this calculator does. The formula is based on a curve-fit I did on the cocoa solid percentages as published in the book Bittersweet.

I’ve wanted to try making pop tarts for a while now, and I finally did after finding this blog about it: Chez Pim. My version is puff pastry (instead of pie pastry) wrapped around 2 squares of Ghirardelli chocolate.  I like the airy flakiness of puff pastry.  It works quite well with the chocolate because there’s not much liquid at all in chocolate, which means the puff pastry stays quite crisp throughout.

Strangely enough, these are best at room temperature, NOT fresh from the oven. There’s something about the chocolate that makes it taste way more chocolaty after it’s cooled. Yum!

Finally used up the last of my tart dough (which was probably in the freezer for like a year!). The jam is Darbo Rose Apricot (I guess the “Rose” refers to a type of apricot?). It looks like the pastry on top wasn’t baked enough but it actually was. The shell is blind-baked first, which is why it’s far darker. Lisa and I liked it quite a bit. Jam and tart dough… so simple yet so tasty!

For a little fun on Easter, and to use up extra chocolate coating I had in the fridge from Chocolate-Dipped Frozen Bananas, I decided to give some Peeps a chocolate bath.  I skewered the little yellow bunnies with toothpicks and then dunked them in a narrow wine glass in which I put the coating.
Continue reading Chocolate-Dipped Peeps

One of the simplest frozen desserts to make is chocolate-dipped frozen bananas. It’s a great way to use up bananas that are at the peak of ripeness but that you don’t want to eat right away. There are many recipes around for it, but of the ones I tried I wasn’t satisfied for one reason or another, so below is my own variation.

Continue reading Chocolate-Dipped Frozen Bananas

I tried out my new camera on a recent trip to Point Reyes with Lisa. Here’s some nice pics of wildflowers there, with an explanation of each one.

This one above is called Bleeding Hearts (Dicentra formosa). It’s not hard to see why. It’s one of the more unusual wildflowers I’ve seen. They seemed to be in somewhat shady areas.

Continue reading Point Reyes Wildflowers

This shot was taken with my new Canon XSi with the 60 mm macro lens. The shot was taken with aperature priority, f/5, 1/200 second, ISO-200 (Auto). Lisa and I were in Point Reyes National Seashore, walking along the Bear Creek Trail that goes from the Bear Valley Visitor Center to Arch Rock. I spotted this bumble bee buzzing along the flowers and I took several shots. This one is the most impressive.

This was very tasty. It was the first time I used a lattice cutter. You roll it over the dough and it makes offset cuts. After that you just pull the sides and the holes open up. It was a little tricky in that the dough stuck together slightly after rolling. I had to manually open some of those holes. This is puff pastry with pastry cream. Recipes for both of those components is in The Baker’s Dozen Cookbook.

Ingredients:
Pastry cream
Puff pastry (I used a “quick” puff pastry rather than the real one that takes several hours to make.  I’d imagine both real and store-bought should work here but possibly with different baking times)

To make the dessert (makes 8):

1. preheat oven to 375 F
2. roll out the puff pastry to 1/8 inch high, and roughly 12 by 16 inches
3. cut pastry lengthwise into two 6 by 16 inch rectangles
4. cut each rectangle into 2 pieces, one 4 by 16 inches and one 2 by 16 inches
5. run the lattice cutter along both 2 by 16 inch pieces
6. pull on the long side of each of the lattice cut pieces to open up the holes
7. cut each lattice cut piece into 4 and each of the remaining two rectangles into 4 (you should now have 8 bottoms and 8 tops for the pastries)
8. on each bottom spread roughly two tablespoons of pastry cream to within a quarter inch of each edge
9. place the tops on and press the edges into the bottoms (at this point the pastries may be frozen for up to 3 months)
10. bake pastries on an ungreased light-colored aluminum baking sheet for about 20 minutes (add 5 or more minutes if frozen), or until the pastry is browned on the edges and the lattice top is beginning to brown
11. place pastries on a cooling rack for 5 minutes