This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie selection was chosen by Babette of the blog Babette Feasts… and for a lemon lover like me, well, it was a pure delight :) With the warm summer sun fast approaching (heck, where I live it’s already here!) it’s nice baking with lemon and other lighter flavors. Having recently planted a variety of citrus trees around our yard, I’m anticipating a bumper crop of organic fruit later this year. Now that’s something to look forward to!
This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe was selected by Megan of My Baking Adventures and she chose the Tiramisu Cake. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time you’ll know I steer far clear of anything that smells or tastes like coffee. The mere scent of it does a number on my tummy that’s not unlike the oft-described symptoms of morning sickness. Yup… pretty bad. But tiramisu is one of DH’s all time favorite desserts and he always orders it when we’re out. So when I considered sitting this week out I thought about how wonderful my husband is… and how thrilled he’d be with this dessert… and quite literally completing this week’s recipe became a full on labor of love :)
This week’s Tuesday with Dorie recipe was the Chocolate Cream Tart selected by Kim of Scrumptious Photography. Once again I couldn’t quite bring myself to do the just standard recipe and instead decided to play around with flavor combinations. I made a total of three tarts… two 4″ and one 6″. This one above is a 4″ Chocolate Banana Cream tart. A thin layer of banana flavored cream followed by a thick layer of banana flavored chocolate filling and topped with a layer of banana flavored whipped cream. DH picked this combo and I used Banana Cream Rum for the flavoring. It was a total winner in his book! I had to rush and get photos because he couldn’t wait to taste this… and once he started, well, the nom-nom-nom sounds were not far behind. He LOVED this! But remember, I made a total of three tarts. Sooooooo…. care to see the other two?
This week’s Tuesday with Dorie host was Sihan of the blog Befuddlement and she chose the Blueberry Crumb Cake. I’ve made Blueberry Crumb Cakes before… but never Dorie’s recipe for one so I figured I’d give this a whirl if for no other reason than to compare :)
If you haven’t noticed, blueberries are a bit expensive right now. Fresh blueberries were $4 for a 6oz container which is quite a bit out of my “willing to spend” range. Alternatively, frozen unsweetened blueberries were the same price… but for a 16oz bag; you do the math ;-) I had actually thought about skipping this week as I just wasn’t feelin it but at the last minute caved in since “Eddie Bells” was doin it.
The recipe itself wasn’t difficult though it was time consuming. The challenging part for me was the “crumb” topping. I’ve made crumb topping several times but for some reason this one didn’t work out for me. I followed the directions however I must have overprocessed it because when it came time to remove it from the fridge, it was anything but crumbly! Instead, what I had resembled the consistency of peanut butter. Uh… yeah… not a good thing.
Dorie indicates this should bake for about an hour. Mine took about 90 minutes and still the doneness was inconsistent at best :( The edges were overdone (even though I’d tented it with foil at the 50 minute mark) and the center was definitely underdone. All-in-all, this was not my finest hour.
The taste was good, but my personal opinion is this is nothing to write home about. In fact I was pretty disappointed since so many other TWD’ers absolutely raved about it. If you’d like the recipe, see page 192 of Dorie’s book Baking From My Home To Yours or visit hostess Sihan’s blog.
Have a delicious day!
This week’s Tuesday with Dorie was hosted by Liliana of My Cookbook Addiction. If you’ve never visited her blog, you should! It’s cute and a lot of fun. She’s got some recipes there that I can’t wait to try. For her selection, Liliana chose Dorie’s French Yogurt Cake with Marmalade Glaze. While I did make the French Yogurt Cake something tells me you can look at that picture and tell that’s not quite a marmalade glaze flowing over it :)
I’ll confess right here, when I read the recipe I thought it was called “Lemon Yogurt Cake”. Not sure how it happened other than the fact that I’ve got serious lemon-on-the-brain syndrome going on. I’m still trying to figure out how to approach my neighbors down the way and ask if I can harvest the crop of lemons overflowing on their front-yard tree. What can I say… I’m shy. I’ve been consumed with all things lemon lately and I honestly thought this was supposed to be a lemon yogurt cake. When I went to the store to buy yogurt… I bought lemon yogurt. I should also confess that I love yogurt and eat it for breakfast probably 4-5 days each week. Once I discovered this recipe did not call for lemon yogurt but instead plain yogurt, well, it was too late… my yogurt was lemon and we were just gonna go for it from there! LOL.
When I read the instructions for making the marmalade glaze, it called for lemon marmalade. Okay so maybe that’s where I got the lemon brain-wave with this cake! But wait… lemon marmalade? Not something easily found in my neck of the woods and I live in a big city. I wanted to be true to this recipe so I scoured the internet for recipes to make my own lemon marmalade. I discovered it’s not terribly difficult however it does take time. Most recipes indicated at least 24hrs so there went that idea. Oh sure, I could’ve used Orange Marmalade (which I have) but thought it might interfere with the lemon flavor in the cake itself so the marmalade glaze wasn’t happening :(
I decided to make a batch of lemon curd and used some of the warm curd to glaze the top of my cake. Uh… can we say YUM!!!! But of course that wasn’t enough for me, I had to spoon some of the curd directly on my cake. Uh… can we say MEGA YUM! Wow – awesome idea… though admittedly I do love love love love LOVE lemon curd :)
Take a moment to check out the rest of the TwD bakers and how their French Yogurt Cake turned out. There were a few variations given in Dorie’s recipe so I bet there are some great cakes out there. Speaking of the recipe it’s on page 224 of Dorie’s book Baking From My Home To Yours (and probably on Liliana’s blog too).
Have a delicious day!
