Brioche 2011 and mis en place for a Heavenly Cake

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Well, the cake is not done yet. Here is some brioche I made recently though, for the Shavuout holiday. I have come to the conclusion that Rose's Brioche Recipe is the best! I have made several versions of brioche from 'The Bread Baker's Apprentice' and Rose's is just all that much better.

This is about as far as I got tonight. Mis en place! I'll have to try and finish tomorrow.

And here are some random flowers from our new neighborhood. I was disappointed to see that the fancy big suburban supermarket in our new dig has mostly cake mixes, whereas the overcrowded urban store in our old brooklyn neighborhood had what I can consider now a nice selection of baking supply goods.   

Rose! If you are reading this, we still are only 1/2 hour drive from brooklyn in West Hempstead, LI! You are welcome to drop by anytime. :)

Brioche 2010

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Hooray! My baking hobby has been going on for a full year now!

For those of you who might wonder how I got into baking in the first place, it all has to do with a very pregnant Mrs. deserting the kitchen for the home stretch and leaving me to my own devices. I think she's glad I kept it up. ;)

The first thing I baked was "Rich Man's Brioche" from the Bread Baker's Apprentice.

Here they are again baked for this year's holiday.

:)

Holiday flowers.

I guess word of my baking has gotten around town. Someone asked me to bake a cake for their sons' party. I baked an orange genoise for them from RHC. 

Heavenly Cake - Pumpkin Cheese Cake

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This cheese cake was just wonderfull!

As a full sized spring-form pan will not fit in my toaster oven I had to make mini cheesecakes.

Needless to say, they did not last very long.

Blackened pecans and burnt noisette... err... I mean toasted Pecans and buerre noisette...


My first attempt at toasting these:

It is a bit more difficult to toast nuts in the toaster as they are very close to the heating element. The trick is just to use a lower temp and give it a little longer.


Here is what they looked like the second time around:

I never made buerre noisette before so the first try got a little burnt:

So I tried again:

Ahh, Much better! No burnt smell.

After a couple hours it looked like this:

Mis en Place:

My food-processor is parve so I had to make the crust in the blender. It worked fine actually, the blade just does not reach everything and creates a whirlpool effect in the middle. You have to keep taking it off and banging it to get the blade to process it all.

I had a little trouble figuring out how to push the crust up the sides. In the end I used the coffee canister. There must be a better way...

Pumpkin and sugar:

Mix mix...

Here the little guys are in their metallic undies and water bath ready for a nice toast:

Chava likes Cheesecake too.

Out of the oven:

Burnt object number 3... the caramel:

The caramel was still tolerable, delicious in fact. However, I may save the rest of it for some candy apples instead of putting the rest of it on the cheesecake. After doing two batches of toasted pecans I did not feel like making another batch for the top.

The cheesecake itself was out of this world! The buerre noisette really did add something and the texture really does change after a night in the fridge (we just had to try one of these when it first came out of the oven.)

The next cake I will make will be the carrot cake, G-d willing.