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Chicken with White Cream Sauce
by: Renée via We Cook Together on Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:46:00 -0500

Keywords: risotto , Renée , Julia Child , Chicken

Tonight I made Chicken with White Cream Sauce from the Julia Child cookbook because we were having our friend Anthony over for dinner. I've made it once before and I think it came out better last time. This time we had a few things that didn't work out quite like I wanted.

1) I didn't realize that the bottle white wine I had in the fridge didn't have very much in it, so I ended up using less wine and more vermouth.

2) I didn't check how much Arborio rice we had left and had to send Chris and our friend Anthony to the store to get more when I had already put the chicken in the oven and started the onions for the risotto. The chicken was out of the oven for more than 20 minutes before we ate.

3) My camera battery died in the middle of me cooking so there are not a lot of 'in progress' pictures. This is a picture of the chicken breasts once I cleaned them, rubbed them with lemon juice and salt and peppered them.

This is the cream sauce bubbling after I added the heavy cream

The final product on a bed of risotto (also from the Julia Child cookbook).

The chicken came out a little drier this time (probably from being kept in the pan for too long while they ran to the store) but it was still really yummy. The risotto was perfect, in spite of me having to throw out the first batch of onions and start over once the new container of rice arrived. All served with a side of steamed broccoli.

For dessert I made Chocolate Guinness Cake with Bailey's Buttercream and Chocolate Ganache. Yuuuummmy. It was so good. Check out my baking blog for details on that.

Edit on 8.28.08 to answer Danny's questions:

For the chicken I used white wine (chardonnay) and vermouth because that is what I had in the kitchen. Also, I used chicken stock since I was making chicken (didn't make sense to me to use beef stock). I'm trying to remember but I'm pretty sure I read the recipe wrong. I thought it said a 1/4 c of vermouth and a 1/4 c of white wine, but looking at it now it seems to only say 1/4 of vermouth. Oh well, it was still yummy.

Next time I make this I am going to follow the variation recipe on page 269 for Chicken Breasts with Mushrooms and Cream, because that just sounds delicious.

For the risotto, I again used chicken stock because I was serving it with chicken. I don't know that I would change that if I were cooking beef only because beef stock can have an overbearing flavor and this risotto has such a delicate flavor.
Lemon Poppy Bread
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:17:00 -0500

This recipe is by Emeril Lagasse. I found it here on foodnetwork.com. It was very easy, I had most of the ingredients in the house and even though it is technically a muffin recipe it worked very nicely as a quick bread with a little extra time in the oven. The only ingredients you may not keep regularly in your pantry would be the buttermilk, which I had due to another recipe use, and the poppy seeds, which I found very easily in the spice aisle of Waldbaum's (our local supermarket).

I made this in my stoneware loaf pan. It came out perfect. Moist, golden, not too heavy. Chris loved it. I hated it. I don't know if it was the buttermilk or too much lemon or what but there was a very sour-ish taste that I just did not enjoy. It wasn't tart, it was sour. (my buttermilk is fine, it's only a few days old, smells good) I really wanted to like it, I generally love lemon poppy bread/muffins, but this one I just did not like one bit. I think next time I will try to substitute the buttermilk or try a different recipe entirely. I chose this one because it did not involve plain yogurt, of which I have none. If you like the flavor of buttermilk, by all means, make this recipe. It really came out looking and smelling wonderful.

Anyway, back to the kitchen.....
Cupcakes? No, Cupcake Cake!
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:12:00 -0500

Keywords: custard , cupcake

We went over our neighbors' house for a little barbecue and I decided to make Gâteau À L'Orange (orange spongecake) Cupcakes with Crème Pâtissière (custard filling) and Crème Au Beurre (butter cream) flavored with Eau De Rose (rosewater). If the French didn't tip you off, I got all the recipes from Julia Child's book 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' (40th Anniversary Edition).

On a side note: if you do not have this book, you should buy it. It's excellent. There are tips and directions for everything from buying the right produce to how to use a knife effectively to how to perform seemingly hard culinary feats with ease (such as Soufflé and Roux). It is a teaching book, meaning sometimes it sounds like a textbook, but the directions are so explicit that you can't help but cook a delicious meal.

Back to our regularly scheduled blog...

So Julia's spongecake is supposed to be just that, cake. I decided to try it as cupcakes. Everything went very well, except that I left them in the oven too long, waiting for the tops to be golden brown while the bottoms burned. I thought 'oh no. what do I do? make a new batch? not bring cupcakes?!' Then I was hit with a very clever plan. I would make a cupcake cake!

Since only the very bottoms were burned I was able, with the help of Chris and Danny, to slice off the burnt part and have left the very delicious and nicely cooked tops of the cupcakes. I inverted 9 of them and placed them in a pyrex square dish, spooned over my custard, topped with right-side-up cupcake tops and then iced each cupcake with the Rosewater Butter Cream.

The verdict?

Cake? delicious!
Custard? delicious!
Buttercream? tastes like soap! ew.

It may not have come out very beautiful, but it sure was yummy (once you scraped off that icky pink stuff, what was I thinking with that color?).

So, they weren't the beautiful masterpieces that I envisioned when I started.... so what? This is the lesson of 'you can't always be perfect and sometimes that's ok'.
Orange Chiffon Cupcakes
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:52:00 -0500

Keywords: flower , cupcake , orange

This weekend we were invited to our friends' house for a cookout in honor of her Mom visiting. I decided to make something new that I had never made before. I have been playing around with what flavors I wanted to try out and how I would decorate them. The inspiration for these came from the classic orange/vanilla creamsicle. Another big part of the deciding factors for these cuppies were the fact that I have not gotten to play with my new flower cutter or veiner at all since they arrived about three weeks ago in the mail from A & H Cake Design (and a special thanks to Louise from CakeJournal for telling us which cutters/veiners she uses!).

Anyway they turned out fabulous! The cake was light and fluffy with just enough orange flavor. I just used a regular lemon chiffon recipe and substituted orange for anything lemon and low acid orange juice for the water. The icing (adapted from this recipe on epicurious.com) was delicious and not too sweet (I used less butter and less sugar and more vanilla than recommended).

They were perfect for our first cookout of the season and I cannot wait to try some more of my ideas for flavors!

Anyway, back to the kitchen!
Chocolate Guiness Cake
by: Renée via Baking Experiments on Sun, 16 Mar 2008 20:01:00 -0500

On Friday, we had two of our friends over for dinner since they helped us move into our new apartment in February. Chris was doing all the cooking (yes, I am a lucky girl, aren't I?) so I decided to make Chocolate Guinness Cake.

I first heard of this from Cupcakes Take The Cake. Immediately I knew that Chris and our friends would love it so I went in search of a recipe. I used the one I found on epicurious.com. The only changes I made were that we only had Guinness Draught in the house and not stout so I used that instead and my local grocery store did not have dutch-process cocoa so I used the old standyby Hershey's Cocoa Powder since I was on a schedule and didn't have time to travel to a different store.

Just out of the pan:

The cake came out fantastic. Moist and rich with a good balance of chocolate and a certain 'breadiness' as Chris put it, which I take to mean that even though the cake was quite dense the texture and taste is that of a much lighter cake. It was creamy on the tongue but not in such a way that it stuck to your mouth in an uncomfortable manner. It sliced beautifully and each slice held together very nicely, which I was a little surprised at considering the texture of the filing.

I did attempt the chocolate 'icing' that the recipe called for, but it did not turn out very well. This may have been because of my brain lapsing during my shopping trip and only buying 12oz of chocolate instead of 16oz, but I also think that the cream to chocolate ratio (2 cups cream to 16oz chocolate) would have been off anyway. The 'icing' did not harden in the refrigerator even though I had it in there for about 4 hours. It ended up being a lumpy mess. So I filled the cake with the chocolate mixture and dusted the outside with powdered sugar instead (I also did not level the top layer because it looked too delicious the way it was perfectly rounded).

I am so glad I decided to do this. The chocolate mixture was definitely too sweet to have iced the whole cake with. It was good for the filling in a very thin layer (because of the runnyness of it) but would have overpowered the cake if it had been all over.

The first slice:

Our friends each requested to take an extra slice home with them.

Next time I think I will try it again with this recipe I found on The Cupcakery for Bailey's Buttercream. I still don't think I will ice the whole cake, I will probably just serve each slice with a nice piped dollop of the buttercream next to it on the plate.

Overall: a delicious cake that I will definitely be making again in the future.