ABC - Dark Chocolate Eclairs

This is somewhat of a bittersweet blog post. Not only is it the last ABC blog post of this year, it's also the last recipes post from this year's recipe source, King Arthur Flour. For this occasion, I chose something special, a French pastry called Eclair. These pastries are so versatile. After they're baked, they can be filled with all sorts of flavored pastry creams, or simply whipped cream.

King Arthur Flour has the recipe on their website as well as step-by-step pictures for making the pastry.

Eclairs and cream puffs filled with dark chocolate pastry cream and chocolate glaze

As I mentioned in my last blog post, starting January 2015, we will be baking recipes from the wonderful blog, Scientifically Sweet, written by food scientist Christina Marsigliese. I am very much looking forward to that :o)

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.

ABC - Boston Cream Pie

Orange-flavored Boston Cream Pie

This month's ABC project is Boston Cream Pie. Guess what? It's not really a pie. It's a cake. As a matter of fact, it's Massachusetts' official state dessert and it has its own Wikipedia page. When I saw the Boston Cream Pie recipe on the King Arthur Flour website, I knew I had to make it. The cake looked so soft and fluffy, the pastry cream so silky smooth, and the chocolate glaze so luscious. Then when I baked it, and ran into issues, it started to look like it was going to be the cake from hell (that just looked pretty to lure you in). I'm exaggerating a bit, of course, but I did run into issues, so my problem solving brain already started thinking of a Plan B and came up with a Boston Cream "Trifle" if things went really wrong :o)

If you'd like to join the ABC bakers in their monthly baking adventures, please go to the ABC blog for more information.

ABC - Classic Fruit Tart

For this month's ABC, we're baking the Classic Fruit Tart from The Weekend Baker by Abby Dodge. I found some really good raspberries at the store so that's what I used. Although fruit tarts always look so pretty and appetizing, they always seemed so fussy. I learned with this recipe that that's not the case at all. There might be a few components to it but Abby breaks them down into manageable steps that you can do over the course of 2 or more days. I had some leftover ganache to decorate the tart. I mean, who doesn't love raspberries and chocolate? :o)

Raspberry Tart with Pastry Cream and Chocolate Ganache

A slice of yummy fruity goodness! :o)

If you would like to join the ABC baking club, please email me at HanaasKitchen [at] live [dot] com. Please find more details about our baking club on the ABC blog.

Brioche Cake with Caramel Custard Cream

This post is way late, but better late than never :o) For our fifth Bread Bake-Together (BBT), Janis and I both wanted to bake a sweet yeast recipe to change things up a bit. The choice was easy: Brioche Cake with Caramel Custard Cream from "The Cake Book" by Tish Boyle. Doesn't that sound ridiculously good? :o)

So far I've baked a good handful of recipes from this book and loved each and everyone of them. Needless to say, I was very much looking forward to this recipe as well, especially since it's my first yeast recipe from Tish's book. She clearly mentions that the dough will be very soft and she wasn't joking. It was so soft that it was borderline soupy, but I carried on. To be honest, I was skeptical until the very end, but shouldn't have been. The Brioche Cake turned out great.

Look at all that fluffiness :o)