Sammy's Dot

My experience of traditional English puddings – which are not anything like the foods that I think of as puddings, starting with the fact that they’re traditionally steamed or boiled – is limited to the sticky toffee pudding my aunt made for Christmas Eve dinner this year, and the demonstration of Christmas pudding-making that I saw at Spadina House when I was a kid. Appropriately, that demonstration was in July.

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

This is only my third Daring Baker’s challenge, but there’s no doubt that so far, this is the one that’s required me to step the most beyond what’s familiar to me. Fortunately, although Esther recommended using suet to make the puddings more authentic, it wasn’t a requirement (my semi-vegetarian, health conscious family thanks her), and as it turns out, steaming a pudding isn’t hard. It merely takes some improvisation. Thanks to Audax, my mother’s crockpot immediately suggested itself as an excellent steaming apparatus, combined with a couple of pyrex bowls and a wadded up dishtowel. Getting the bowls out of the crockpot after the puddings were cooked was a scary process, but there were, happily, no disasters.

Since I had not had any idea that one could steam a pie – and certainly I had no idea that it would turn out deliciously – I knew I was going to do at least one version in a pastry crust. I opted for savoury, because we love lentil and vegetable pie with mushroom gravy in this house. Just to be different, though, since I wasn’t going to use suet, I used coconut oil instead of butter – with excellent results. And I had to do a sponge version too, because who doesn’t love cake? The only requirement I had for the sponge version was that it incorporate dulce de leche, which I’ve fallen in love with in a big way ever since a classmate brought some amazing coconut-crusted macaron-type cookies filled with it to our end-of-year potluck. After the coconut-banana bread I’d made the week before, combining the two was as natural as breathing.

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According to Wikipedia, a “tian” is defined thus:

A tian is a tall, conical earthenware cooking vessel used in the Alpes-Maritimes area of France. Today, most of these vessels are produced in the town of Mougins. It is traditionally made from red clay and can be either glazed or unglazed. A modern tian can come lidded or not and sometimes has a looped handle on one side.

Apparently, the word has undergone a significant shift, though: the cranberry orange tian I made for the March Daring Bakers challenge is certainly very far removed from clay pots.

The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.

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Tiramisu: I love the name. According to one source, it means “pick me up”; I don’t speak Italian, but it sounds plausible to my French-conditioned ears. It’s also exactly what one needs after a good meal: a sweet pick-me-up to carry on with the evening’s conversation. I love the idea of it, too: soft, spongy cookies and coffee, cocoa, and delicious mascarpone beaten with pastry cream. Oddly, though, I’ve rarely eaten tiramisu; I remember having it for dessert when I was in Nice, but it wasn’t terribly memorable, and as much as I love to bake, I generally prefer pies and cakes and cookies to a complex composed dessert. However, joining the Daring Bakers is all about trying new things, and so:

The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

The challenge required me to make my own savoiardi (ladyfingers) and my own mascarpone, which was fun. I’m no stranger to baking cookies but the technique for savoiardi was definitely outside of my experience (and clearly I need more practice with the method). I’ve also made paneer, and the method for making mascarpone is similar but not quite the same; it was interesting to compare the two. Making the tiramisu was a good way to get out of a baking rut that I didn’t really realize I was in: although I’ve got some experience with each individual part, except the zabaglione, I’ve never made anything that incorporated many different elements the way tiramisu does.

I definitely need to play around some more, though. My savoiardi were tasty, but I think I must have deflated the batter somehow, because instead of the predicted 36 cookies, I had 15, which wasn’t really enough. I also experimented a bit with the flavours, using amaretto as the liqueur instead of marsala, which I didn’t have. I really love the idea of the fruit flavours some of the other Daring Bakers tried, and if I make  it again I think I’ll head in this direction, because sadly, I didn’t love my execution of tiramisu. It wasn’t that it was bad, but it didn’t really come together as more than the sum of its parts. read more »

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

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I have to begin with a confession. I think this may cost me some of my Canadian cred – even more than the time I blithely said that the animal on our quarter is a moose.

I don’t particularly like Nanaimo bars.

I do love the idea of them: graham cracker crusts (with nuts and coconut, no less!) are yummy, custard is always good, and chocolate is chocolate and nothing else need be said. But put them all together, and for some reason we Canadians tend to produce something so sweet it makes my teeth ache.

I’ve made them twice before, the second time just this last December, while visiting R in Belfast; we brought them to a potluck dinner his co-workers put on, as they asked us to bring something Canadian. It took a good chunk of our last day before coming back to Toronto to track down the ingredients. We never did find graham crackers (though plain digestive biscuits turned out to be more or less indistinguishable), and had to go to five – FIVE! – grocery stores before we found unsalted butter. I was pretty pleased that we managed to make anything at all, given the under-equipped kitchen we had access to, but they turned out like ordinary Nanaimo bars – painfully sweet. I’m not sure R’s colleagues were impressed. (Probably a good thing we didn’t make poutine!) It convinced me that if I made Nanaimo bars again, I was going to do something different.

Fortunately, a few days later I signed up for the Daring Bakers, and the opportunity presented itself. read more »