Board Meeting

For today's skating-club board meeting, I made a couple of things. First, I made Crumb-Topped Coffee Cake from Abby Johnson Dodge's The Weekend Baker. It is brilliant, especially on those pieces where the crumb:cake ratio works in favor of the crumbs.

The scones are from Elinor Klivan's Fearless Baking. I'm not sure if it was the recipe or the weather (it has been pretty damp here), the scones had a relatively cakey texture, not very sconelike at all. However, everybody seemed to like them, so what do I know?

Brownie-Blondie Double Deckers, or the 10x10 Pan

For this week's Lost Lunch Thursday, I was a little fixated with making a batch of bar cookies that combined a blondie with a brownie. I've made a couple of different versions before, but this week, I decided to use a recipe from Abby Johnson Dodge's The Weekend Baker.

After I read over the recipe, I looked at the photo of the bar cookie in the book. Much to my dismay, the bars displayed in the photo -- as baked in a 9x13 pan -- were thinner than what I'd been hoping to make. I then decided that I needed to assemble and bake the cookie dough in a smaller pan to get a thicker cookie. An 8x8 pan would be too small. Even a 9x9 pan seemed as if it would be too small (81 sq. in. vs. 117 sq. in. for the 9x13 pan). Then I remembered the 10x10 pan.

In a couple of her books, Lisa Yockelson has recipes developed to be baked in a 10x10 pan. When I first saw the reference to that pan size, all I could think was "Who the heck owns a 10x10 pan? Where on earth can you buy a 10x10 pan?" Even though I managed to track one down at Amazon.com, I didn't buy it.

Then one day a few years ago, I was in a Sur La Table store in SoHo in Manhattan. The 10x10 randomly crossed my mind, and lo and behold, there it was! And I bought it! I took it home! I washed and dried it! Then I put it away until yesterday! (I think the lesson here as I'm brilliantly rationalizing it is that eventually, I will some how, some way, use the pans and gadgets that I've purchased even though they might spend some portion of their lives gathering dust.)

In the end, I think the 10x10 pan gave me the kind of bar cookie I was looking for. It's thick enough, and it required only 12 minutes or so of extra baking time. Plus, the bars are good. I did my own riff on the recipe and added a cup of white-chocolate chips to the brownie part to contrast with the semisweet chips in the blondie part. They ended up looking and tasting great.

A Tale of Two Orange Bundt Cakes

As I detailed in yesterday's post, "The Botched Effort," I had a rough time with Cook's Country's Orange Bundt Cake. Because I still had oranges to use up (I suspect they're multiplying like tribbles), I decided to make one more orange cake, but this time chose a recipe from Abby Dodge's The Weekend Baker. I like this cookbook and probably haven't used it nearly enough since I bought it a couple of years ago. (Note: Abby's dinner-roll recipe -- extremely fondly known at our house as The Bread of Death -- is awesome.)

Abby's recipe for Rich Orange Butter Cake is very similar to CC's Orange Bundt Cake, but there are some differences. I think the two crucial ones are that Abby uses 1/2 cup more flour in her cake, and she uses a lot more leavening (2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon baking soda vs. CC's 1 teaspoon powder and 1/2 teaspoon soda). If you factor sugar as a liquid ingredient, Abby's recipe uses less liquid overall than CC's.

The CC cake (bottom photo) has a gummy texture, although to be fair, that is probably a result of my use of glaze as a cake-reconstruction substance. I'll have to make that cake again just for comparison's sake. Abby's recipe (top photo) made a beautiful pound cake, with a tight crumb and nice appearance. And it came out of the pan with no undue coaxing. Thanks to The Weekend Baker, I had a respectable orange Bundt to share with some friends this evening.

Props are due to my sous chef, Claire, who assisted with the juicing of the oranges for the second cake.