One Hour “Pastries”–Mini Doughnuts

For those that want to know, doughnuts are not pastries.  Technically, given the way they are made, they would be closer to cakes.  That being said, doughnuts are often sold in bakeries that specialize in pastries, because they are crowd pleasers.  And America is well known for taking liberties with food categories.  The truth is, I recently purchased a new baking pan from Bed Bath & Beyond and I wanted to play with it.  It was very quick, so I thought I would share my results with you.
First off, I will show you a picture of my helper chef, D’argo, who was a little too eager to be a part of the baking process that he was banned from the kitchen while I worked.  He almost tripped me twice, with his frenetic running around.  But he was hopeful through the end of the process that he would be allowed back in.


I promise to only trip you when you are carrying bacon...

 As always, I gathered my ingredients together, to make sure I had everything.  Success!  I had enough for a double batch, assuming everything turned out right.


If you have ingredients in jars your Grandma would love, it will taste even better!

 Here is the pan that started it all.  Isn’t it cute?  On the back of the packaging is a simple recipe for cake doughnuts, made with buttermilk and a touch of sugar.  Wait… there is also a tiny recipe for a vanilla glaze for the doughnuts…


These make mini-doughnuts... or large Cheerios.



If you can't read this, I give all the amounts below.

               















Let’s make that too.  I have the ingredients.  There’s not much to a glaze other than water, a touch of flavor, and a load of sugar.  I even have food coloring.  Ooh!  And sprinkles.  Great donuts have sprinkles! <drool>


Powdered sugar... the most dangerous powder I ever deal with.

 Anyway, back to the doughnuts.  First step, preheat oven to 425.  Second step, spray the doughnut trenches with vegetable oil spray.  Then, judging by the recipe – which you should always read through before making for the first time – my third step was to melt the butter.  As it wasn’t but 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter, it took about 25 seconds in the microwave.


Delicious delicious sunshine!

 Dry ingredients first.  In a big bowl, mix 1 1/4 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 1/4 teaspoon baking powder, 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg, and 1 1/2 teaspoon salt.  Mix it all up.  I just stir with whatever mixing spoon I used last.  But, I'm not that picky.


Avoid the temptation to throw this at someone.

 Add the liquid ingredients: 1/2 cup buttermilk, the melted butter, and 1 egg, lightly beaten.  Stir until moistened.  Do not over stir, because you don’t want to de-fluff the dough.  The key to a great cake donut is fluffiness.  Just ask anyone who has ever eaten a squished doughnut.  They suck.


Don't' fling this at anyone either.



Okay.  You can fling this.  Just a little though.

              










If you have a pastry bag, this dough is just thick enough to load into it, which really helps in loading the tiny doughnut trenches in the pan.  I didn’t have a clean one at hand, so I did what anyone in a hurry would do.  I loaded it into a quart-sized Ziploc bag, sealed it really good, and cut a tiny piece of one corner off.  Quick-time pastry bag.  Fill the doughnut trenches half full says the recipe.  That is easy to do with a pastry bag.  Not so easy to do with a spoon.  You can trust me on this.


They kind of look like tortellini right now.



It looks gross, but trust me, this works.
















                             
Pop the pan in the oven and bake 4-5 minutes.  The doughnuts will be done when you touch one and it springs back.  For anyone who tries this and doesn’t know what this means, if you put your finger on a doughnut and it doesn’t leave an indention… they are ready.  They will still be pale, but don’t let that bother you.  Let it cool for 5 minutes before flopping out of the pan.  Mine pretty much fell right out.  Let them cool on a wire rack.  Respray the pan and load up another dozen.




If you eat one now, you will lose a few tastebuds.  Totally worth it.

     
The recipe says it makes 2 dozen of these bad boys.  But I made a little over three dozen.  As you can tell by the picture below, they overfilled a trench every so often.

This is how Spaghettios make each individual noodle

Now, on to the glaze!  Actually, as the recipe says, it is more of an icing than a glaze.  I added just a touch of yellow liquid coloring.  As you can tell by the photo, I over did it a little.  Well, I like it anyway.  If you want to make a donut glaze to make it look more like your traditional donut... heat the glaze just a little.  This will require you to dip the donut into the glaze, turn it back over, and let it drip over something as it dries (and it will, never fear).  That sounded like a little too much work for me, so I didn't do that.


That looks almost like liquid uranium.

 I decorated the doughnuts three different ways.  First, I used another Ziploc pastry bag (snack size this time) to put a circle of glaze on each doughnut, followed by sprinkles.  Second, I used the pastry bag and swiped stripes across several doughnuts, again followed by sprinkles.  Third, I left some without icing.  My husband, Brant, doesn’t really like icing, so I knew he would eat those.  Melted chocolate would also go over great with these.  But when hasn't chocolate and doughnuts gone together?


Just like the Simpson's doughnuts.... only yellow.



Plain.. for people who can't stand the happiness of sugar.



Tiger striping... you can pretend you are fierce when you eat these!

       
Now that they were done, I needed a taste-monkey to see if they were really good or just so-so.  Brant was the victim – er, taste-monkey – last time, so I decided to try someone new.  The dogs volunteered, but since they can’t talk and will eat anything I thought to find someone else.  So I took the doughnuts to work, and asked a friend from our neighbor lab, Stephanie Brosius, to try.  I captured her immediate reaction.


Taste-monkey Stephanie approves!



We want to eat doughnuts!  (and bacon!)

            

One Hour Pastries–Tarte Tatin

So I am a baking fan.  And yes, I can make my own pastry doughs, crèmes, fondant, crusts, ganaches, and all that rot.  But I know that most of these take more time than I have to spend in an evening.  So, I have decided to find recipes for pastries that can be done in about an hour, like my eye glasses.  First up on the chopping block: Tarte tatins.
A tarte tatin is a French pastry.  It is basically an upside down tart, normally with apples, where the “bottom” is caramelized sugar and butter, then sliced fruit, then pastry on top.  It is served with cream, and is best served warm enough to melt the cream on contact.  It is a lovely treat with very few ingredients, so I knew that it could be done well on the first try.  Several pastry sites and blogs have the tarte tatin on them, and they fall in two categories: those that make the caramel first and those that let the oven do the job.  Unless you are good at making caramel in a pan, you are going to mess up the first times, making it take not only over an hour to make the tarte tatin, but use up more ingredients than you need to.  So, today’s pastry will let the oven do most of the work.  It comes from the website bon appetit, with only a couple of changes based on what was available to me.  I am making both a banana one and an apple one.  Tradition uses apples, but Kathryn (me) loves bananas.
Before your baking night, you will need to gather the following ingredients: 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened (1/2 stick left out for 20 to 30 minutes); 8 tablespoons light brown sugar (don’t use Splenda based, it doesn’t quite caramelize); 4 ripe bananas; 1 sheet puff pastry, thawed (leave this out for at least 30 minutes).  These amounts will vary depending on what you bake the tarte tatin in.  The site’s recipe calls for several crème brulee tins, but I don’t have those.  I used a 9” cake pan, and as you will see, the amounts of ingredients are only guidelines.

First, turn the oven on to 400 degrees.  This is important for you time management.  Believe me, because I forgot this step.  Next, take your pan in one hand and the butter in the other.  Slather that butter all over the inside of the pan, and make it thick.  This is why the measurements don’t exactly matter.  There just needs to be enough butter to prevent anything from sticking to the pan, and to keep the caramelized sugar yummy.  When you are done, say “eww, gross” and throw the rest of that butter away before you are tempted to make some toast.  Real butter is too delicious to eat.  Now is also a great time to wash your hands.

Next up, sugar those babies!  Again, the amount is only a guideline.  Cover the bottom of the pan with a good amount of brown sugar.  I put a couple of tablespoons in my hand and sprinkled until the pan was evenly covered.  For the banana tarte tatin I was feeling spicy, so I added a dash of cinnamon to that sugar.  And yes, I made a mess.  Anyone that knows me is not surprised here.

Now, cut the fruit.  For bananas, just cut diagonally into several pieces.  It took me two bananas for me to cover the 9” pan.  For the apples, I cut each into 8 pieces.  I broke the handy apple corer I was using, but a butcher knife makes quick work of an apple so it was easily done.  Be sure to peel the apple pieces.  Here is where your creativity can shine.  I kept mine simple.

Pastry time!  Using a little flour on a flat surface, roll out the pastry dough to thin it out a little bit.  Then you can cut it out to just a little bigger than the pan you are using.  I laid the dough on top of the fruit and cut around the outside of the pan.  Tuck the dough into the pan, around the fruit.  Don’t be harsh here, just make sure all the fruit is covered by the dough.

The oven should be nice and hot by now.  Put the pans on a cookie sheet (just in case of an overflow) and throw them in the oven.  Set the timer for 25 minutes (less if making a smaller one, but no less than 20 minutes), and go do the other chores you need to do.  I cleaned up the mess, did the dishes, made some peach tea, and watched about five minutes of the Big Bang Theory.

Ding!  D’argo and Rusty, my honorary bakers, run to the kitchen, and we pull out the treats.  Oh… my… goodness to they smell good.

Let them sit for about 5 minutes then flip them over onto a plate.  BEFORE YOU DO:  put a pot holder or towel underneath the pan to prevent finger burn.  Put the plate over the top and flip.  I like to tap the bottom of the pan a couple of times too.  Done!  If you don’t have any crème to serve with it, use whip cream or a little ice cream.  We had none, so I served it up naked to my test-monkey, Brant…

So there we have it.  An easy, low-ingredient pastry that is quick enough to make in an evening, and will be eaten even faster.  I will leave you with a picture of my honorary bakers, D’argo and Rusty.  They are not allowed to touch anything, but they hang around just in case I drop something.

Creative Dreaming

I get pretty stressed out at work.  A lot of it is in my own mind, but still, I get stressed.  I found, thanks to my Brant, that thinking about being creative actually helps me get through many stressful days.  Here is what I think about.

We have talked many times about opening an eatery called “Sci-Fi Café and Bakery.”  I love to plan what I would serve up at that bakery if I could do anything I wanted.  So far, I have imagined making mini-bombes, one for each of the planets in our solar system, with three others for the Sun, the moon, and Pluto (which is no longer a planet, but who cares, right?).  FYI: a true bombe is a French confection consisting of several layers of frozen sherbet or ice cream made into a dome shape.  The bakery I used to work at fudged the idea a little by making it several thin layers of a cake and flavored pastry cream, shaped into a dome and covered with fresh whip cream.  I would come up with the grand flavors of each of them.  An example would be Mars: Chocolate-chili pepper cake with cinnamon filling, iced with red chocolate whipped cream.

This made me want to research different types of pastries.  If it was truly going to be a sci-fi bakery, not only would I have to come up with unique and delicious pastries not often sold in Birmingham, but I would need to put a sciencey-fictioney theme to each one, to brand them for the store.  So I researched pastries from places OTHER THAN France and Italy.  And I zeroed in on Hungarian pastries.  There I found the Zserbo, fluffo, Isli, beigli, and kifli.  They all look delicious.  I decided to try to make one of them.  The end result of this daydreaming was that I could make zserbo, and make it pretty darn good on my first try.  It is basically five layers of handmade pastry dough, rolled thin, with apricot preserves and crushed pecans in between and topped with a chocolate ganache.

Another daydream sparked my baking creativity to try another pastry, this time from the British Isles – banoffee pie.  Banoffee is a mash up of banana and toffee, the two main ingredients.  This decadent treat is normally made by boiling an unopened can of sweetened condensed milk for a couple of hours, but I wasn’t willing to do that, because of its possibility of blowing up.  So I compromised on the dulce de leche filling and made several mini pies instead of one large one.  My co-workers and Brant adored this one.

Long story short, don’t be afraid to daydream once in a while about what you would do if you had this or that.  If I had a bakery of my own, I would make my own versions of international pastries that no one around here has ever tasted.  And because of that dream I found out that many of those pastries are well within my abilities now.  Why don’t you try it, and let me know what you come up with?

No Time for Creativity

Welcome to my new blog, "No Time for Creativity."  This is my place to put what enspires me, what I like, and what gets me to create when I come home from work too exhausted to do anything but sit.

If you are reading this blog, you might recognize this scenario.  I work from 8:30 to 5 at my job, but it takes me about an hour to get there and a little more to come home.  So the majority of my waking hours are spent doing something about work.  I barely see my husband until the sun sets most of the year.  I don't have kids, but I have two dogs who are more underappreciated than they should be.  My weekends are also filled.  Friday evenings we have game night with friends.  Saturday is grocery day, chore day, cooking for the week day; and Saturday night we often have friends over for movie night.  Sunday is also a chore filled day, and every other week we host our science fiction writing group, which takes up most of the afternoon.  It is a filled life, but a happy one.

But I long to be creative.  To make pretty things, useful things.  To turn something used up into something useful.  To be creative.

The problem is, when I get home, cook dinner, and eat with my husband, I am too tired to do anything.  Sometimes it is physically tired, but mostly it is mentally tired.  I am drained, and all I want to do is vegetate.  I have dozens of projects started, but rarely finish anything, because I know it takes so much prep work to start a creative endeavor that it will take days to see the fruits of any labor.  I don't know about you, but I find it really hard to start a project if I don't have the time to finish it that evening.

My husband, Brant, said I should do something about it.  "Write a blog about what you do, your take on the things you make.  You have a very interesting take on what you do, and there are people out there who need to know it.  And you are wicked smart..."  Or something like that anyway.  So, I picked three of my hobbies that I don't ever feel I have time for, and make time for them.  These three are: baking, scrapbooking, and writing music.  I hope to fill this blog with where I find ideas, how to get started, how to stop in the middle of project and not forget about them, and pretty much anything else I can think of.  I hope you will stay with me through all these ramblings.  And together, maybe, we can keep our creative juices flowing.