How many ways can you pronounce the word “tuile”? As it turns out, many ways. Fortunately, the pronunciation is about all I struggled with when it comes to the January 2009 Daring Bakers‘ challenge.

This month’s challenge is brought to us by Karen of Bake My Day and Zorra of 1x umruehren bitte aka Kochtopf. They have chosen Tuiles from The Chocolate Book by Angélique Schmeink and Nougatine and Chocolate Tuiles from Michel Roux.

Apparently, the word tuiles means tile in French and the cookies are named tuiles because after they’re shaped, they resemble a type of tile used in France.

I’d never made tuiles before but I have always found myself enchanted by both the shape of the cookie and the apparent lightness of the cookie. Karen and Zorra offered two sweet variations: one that makes a smooth cookie and one that makes a lacy cookie. They also provided a savoury variation.

I chose to make the sweet variation only and I flavoured mine with vanilla and lemon. The second part of the challenge was to shape the tuiles and combine them with something light and airy.

As I pulled my tuiles out of the oven, I rolled them around a spoon handle and then made a filling of whipped cream and dulce de leche. Some of my tuiles were a bit thick so as I rolled them, they cracked slightly. But once filled and stacked on a pretty plate, you couldn’t really notice any of the cracks.

These were delicious. I have to admit that I enjoyed them by sucking out the filling first and then munching the remaining tuile.

Thanks so much to Zorra and Karen for starting 2009 in such a light and pretty way!

Ciao!

To see a copy of the challenge recipes, please read Karen’s post and Zorra’s post.

Thankfully, I’m back to blogging. While I don’t mind taking planned breaks from my little bloggy, forced breaks never go over very well. My PC decided to be very naughty last week and caused me some grief. Happily, that is over.

My PC decided to misbehave right after announcing the new Magazine Mondays logo. And wouldn’t you know it I got more MM submissions than ever but couldn’t post them last week so I’m posting them today. And before I get to my submission for this week’s MM, I thought I’d share all the submissions that I’ve received over the past 2 weeks:

MM’s biggest fan, Wandering Coyote of ReTorte gives us Fish in Tomato Sauce and Mexican Chocolate Pudding. Thanks, Wandering Coyote!

Di of Di’s Kitchen Notebook brings us a Blood Orange and Mango Sorbet that makes me want to run out and buy a crate of blood oranges and mangoes! Thanks, Di!

And from the department of best recipe names we have Fusilli alla Crazy Bastard (I love that …) from Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. Thanks, Natashya!

And last but not least my sweet Jenny made Mustard-Garlic Flank Stank for her very first MM post! Thanks, Jenny!

Thanks to everyone who participated! And remember, if you post a recipe from a magazine, just let me know about it and I’ll link to it in my next MM post.

As for me, I come to you today with a failed recipe. Failed, not so much because of the recipe, but more because I was a hurried mess when I was making it and messed it up royally. I’d say 95% per cent of my MM entries have been winners but this one, not so much.

What you see pictured above are (supposed to be) Ham-and-Gruyere Thumbprints from Martha Stewart Living. The problem is that while making these, I forgot to add half the ingredients to the batter and was forced to frantically sprinkle the missing ingredients on after the thumbprints went into the oven.

Not good.

I made these for our New Year’s Eve party and while they didn’t turn out horribly, they weren’t that great either.

Ah, well! They can’t all be good!

See you for the next Magazine Mondays post … have a great week everyone!

Ciao!

Computer woes have afflicted the Cream Puff!

Okay … it’s not that bad … but I am having some issues with my home PC so I won’t be blogging over the next week or so. Just wanted to send a note to all those that submitted Magazine Mondays entries: I have received them and thank you for them! They’ll all go up for the next edition of Magazine Mondays.

And now back to solving these pesky PC problems …

Ciao!

I think I’ve written this many times before on my blog but whenever people ask me what I most enjoy baking, my answer is always cookies.

I love all baking, but cookies are my favourite because to me they offer a certain freedom that other baked goods don’t. You have to commit to a cake or a pie. A cookie, in my humble opinion, is innately free.

You can make them big or small.

You can sandwich them or not.

You can dip them in milk.

Last year, I had the chance to review Carole Walter’s Great Coffee Cakes, Sticky Buns, Muffins & More. Later in the year, I had the chance the review another Carole Walter’s book, Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets.

I’m a huge fan of Carole Walter’s because to me, she is a baker’s baker. By that I mean that her books are perfect for helping the home baker produce truly worthy baked goods. While there are a lot of great baking books out there, some of them that claim to be geared to the home baker miss the mark.

Great Cookies won an IACP award in 2004 and rightly so. It’s a hardcore cookie book with recipes that cover every category from drop cookies to cut-out cookies.

Even though it was published in 2003, the recipes feature classics, some new cookies I’ve never seen before and lots of other cookies that are bound to please no matter how much time goes by.

While I was busy baking Christmas cookies, I was craving something old-fashioned and I found myself craving a good ol’ oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, I cracked open Carole’s book and decided to try her recipe for Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies only to discover that I had exhausted my supply of chocolate chips. In fact, I had no chocolate whatsoever in the house.

Scary times.

Anyway, I did have a bag of butterscotch chips hiding in a cupboard corner so I improvised and threw those in. Next to the bag of butterscotch chips was a half empty bag of toffee bits so I threw those in as well. And I also had some praline left from the December Daring Bakers’ challenge so I figured, what the heck, why not throw that into the batter too!

The end result was surprisingly good. I was worried the cookies might be too sweet but they weren’t. And after the heavier and more complex foods and desserts that we enjoyed during the holidays, it was really nice to settle down with these cookies and a glass of milk!

Hope you get a chance to check out Carole’s book!

Ciao!

Everything-in-the-Cupboard Oatmeal Cookies
Based on Carole Walter’s Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies from Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets.

Note: You can of course use chocolate chips or whatever add-ins you like. I made about 3 dozen 3-inch cookies with this recipe.

3/4 cup brown sugar
2-1/2 cups rolled oats (large flake)
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 tbsp. light corn syrup
1 large egg
1 tbsp. vanilla extract
1 cup butterscotch chips
1 cup toffee bits
1/4 cup ground praline (optional)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. and line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

In a food processor, process the brown sugar, 1/2 a cup of the oatmeal and the granulated sugar until it’s very fine; set aside.

In another bowl, sift together the flour, the salt and the baking soda. Add in the remaining oats and set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, combine the butter and the corn syrup. Mix with the paddle attachment until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes).

With the mixture on low speed, add the processed oatmeal mixture and mix until combined.

Add the egg and vanilla extract and mix until just combined.

With the mixture on low speed, add the remaining dry ingredients and mix until just combined (don’t overmix).

With a wooden spoon, mix in the chips, toffee bits and praline (if you’re using it).

Spoon dollops of the cookie dough onto the cookie sheets, leaving about 2 inches between cookies. You can make these as large or small as you like.

Bake the cookies for 10 minutes (keeping an eye on them so they don’t burn if you’ve made small cookies). When they’re done they should be slightly golden around the edges.

Remove the cookie sheets from the oven and let rest on a rack for 10 minutes before transferring the cookies to a wire rack to cool completely. Let your cookie sheets cool and then repeat with the remaining batter.

Enjoy!

Welcome to the first edition of Magazine Mondays for 2009!

Before I start attacking my magazine pile in this newly minted year, I must tie up a few loose ends left over from 2008.

To begin with, I owe enourmous thanks to Wandering Coyote of the blog ReTorte. She has been a huge supporter of Magazine Mondays, so much so that she offered to host MM for the entire month of December when I mentioned that I’d be too busy to host the event.

She did a fabulous job so many thanks to her!

The final chapter of Magazine Mondays, 2008 ends with the image that opens this post. After MM turned a year old in October 2008, I decided it was time that the event had an image to go with it so I approached one of my very favourite artists: Julianna Smith.

Allow me to digress for one teeny moment.

I first learned about Julianna when I read about her on her sister’s blog (her sister just happens to be Alicia Paulson of Posie Gets Cozy … talk about a seriously talented family!) As I looked at Julianna’s site, I was so enchanted by her work and then completely blown away when I realized that I had recently bought a birthday greeting card that was designed by her!

If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.

I contacted Julianna and asked her if she’d be interested in working with me on a few projects and she said yes! Considerable time passed (in other words … Cream Puff procrastinated), but I finally got my stuff together and approached Julianna with the Magazine Mondays idea. She agreed and a short while later, she produced this lovely image for me!

This will become the new symbol of Magazine Mondays. As soon as I figure how to do it (hee), I’ll be adding it to my sidebar (in other words … Cream Puff welcomes any advice on how to do that).

I want to extend my most heartfelt thanks to Julianna. I look forward to working with you in the future on other projects!

And so now we get back to our regularly scheduled MM post. I have a lot of candidates for MM posts but I decided to start this year off with a recipe that I actually made last year, but never posted. It’s from an issue of Martha Stewart Living (that I subsequently recycled so I’m not sure what issue it is) and it’s called Syrupy Blood Oranges. I thought it would be nice to start the year off with something that is both citrusy and crisp, but also sweet. Enjoy!

Ciao!

Here’s the recipe for Syrupy Blood Oranges.

Here are some other MM posts that you might want to check out:

Dan of Casual Kitchen made a mouth-watering mole sauce.

Wandering Coyote of ReTorte made a Lemon Artichoke chicken that I want right now!

So here’s my dirty little secret: For almost all of my 20s and part of my early 30s, I regularly skipped breakfast.

And by regularly I mean, almost all the time.

So there you have it. I don’t have a particularly good reason for being such a habitual offender beyond the most basic (and perhaps saddest), which is that I simply didn’t care enough to organize myself, to make time, to plan ahead and to prepare.

You see, they don’t call breakfast the most important meal of the day because they feel like it. It is the most important meal of the day. And any meal that’s the most important does require organization, time, planning and preparation.

My lack of all of the above led to the usual laundry list of ills associated with skipping meals: mid-morning hunger, low energy, snack attacks, weight gain and sluggishness.

In place of a fulfilling breafkast, I enjoyed a parade of mid-morning snacks purchased from the nearest coffee shop. These snacks involved coffee and some sort of sweet. I rationalized this terrible habit by telling myself that it was okay since I did manage to eat a lot of fruit and vegetables and I always had a decent dinner.

It is amazing to me that someone that prides herself on being a good cook and baker, someone that prides herself on her family’s culinary traditions and that someone that prides herself on having a responsible attitude towards food could possibly have been so stupid.

But I was.

I’m not exactly sure what initiated my breakfast awareness, but shortly after I turned 30, it began to sink in that breakfast was a necessity and that with a good breakfast I’d be arming myself to have a good day.

I am happy to say that now, in my mid-30s, I have breakfast almost every day. (I still have about a handful of days a year when time gets the best of me and I don’t eat anything. Never said I was perfect!)

From Monday to Friday, my breakfasts are simple, straightforward and delicious. I will eat everything from cereal with fruit, yogurt with granola, yogurt with fruit, hot cereal and toast with butter and jam. What I have really depends on how I’m feeling. There are, however, a few common denominators regardless of what I’m having:

I always have fruit in some form every morning. Whether it’s berries in my cereal or an apple after I’ve had a slice of toast, I eat fruit every morning.

I always have dairy in some form every morning. A glass of milk. A cup of yogurt. Whatever the case may be, dairy for breakfast is good.

I only eat things that I like for breakfast. No matter how “healthy” something is, if you don’t like it, trying to force yourself to eat it is usually not going to end successfully. Over the years, I have learned what foods I like to eat in the morning and those are the ones that I enjoy. I love toast with butter and jam. But rather than eat refined white bread, I enjoy a variety of wholesome breads made with grains, nuts and seeds. And yes I still put butter and jam on my bread because butter and jam are beautiful things and a life without them wouldn’t be much fun (for me).

What do I do on Saturday and Sunday, you ask? Like most people, I have more time for breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays, which means that I can be a bit more elaborate in my preparations. Also, as I believe that indulgence (in moderation) is good for the soul, Saturdays and Sundays are the days that I like to make pancakes, waffles, omelettes, breakfast pastries and french toast. I don’t have these all the time, mind you, but if I do have them it will be on the weekend.

Making time for breakfast on a daily basis has changed my life. For starters, the urge to fall asleep at 11:00 every morning has disappeared. I feel better. I don’t feel like I’m 110 years old. I’ve lost weight. I look better. I’m healthier.

So what prompted this confession? After all of the indulgences of the holidays, I found myself thinking about what I would be cooking and eating during the month of January and that of course led to much contemplation about what I would choose as my Flavour of the Month.

I found myself perusing The Overburdened Bookshelf and my eyes settled on a book called Morning Food: Breakfasts, Brunches & More for Savoring the Best Part of the Day by Margaret Fox and John Bear. Here’s a book that I’ve had for several years but never used.

I suddenly found myself imagining a month of delicious breakfasts so I knew I had to choose this book as the Flavour of the Month. For the first recipe that I tried, I chose one called Kaiserschmarren (The Empoeror’s Omelette). I’m not a huge omelette fan but I chose this one when I realized that it’s actually a cross between an omelette and a pancake that I enjoyed when I was in Austria in 2006.

During my trip, I had the chance to have dinner with Angelika of The Flying Apple and for our dessert, we tried a very traditional dish that was a pancake of sorts that’s then torn apart with forks and served with various accompaniments like stewed fruit. Angelika strongly recommended that I try it (even though I was stuffed) and I did and certainly didn’t regret it.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to try this dish at home, but this time for breakfast.

If you’re a breakfast eater, I congratulate you. If you’re a breakfast skipper, I’m not going to lecture you. I know what it’s like and believe me, you have to come to accept breakfast on your own terms. But take it from this reformed Cream Puff, you’re missing the best meal of the day!

Ciao!

Here are some recipes for this dish (can be enjoyed for breakfast or for dessert) that you might like:

http://www.thecookingadventuresofchefpaz.com/2008/01/27/kaiser-pancakes-kaiserschmarren/

http://www.austrianfood.net/2008/01/07/kaiserschmarren/

http://www.sheries-kitchen.com/recipes/german/kaiserschmarren.htm

http://www.hsn.com/wolfgang-puck-recipe-kaiserschmarren_at-2740_xa.aspx

http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Kaiserschmarren

Today is the Epiphany. In the Christian holiday tradition, it’s the day that the three Magi visited the Baby Jesus. In other holiday traditions it’s also referred to as the Twelfth Night, the end of the Christmas season. In Italy, the eve of the Epiphany is the day that La Befana, a wizened old woman, travels throughout Italy rewarding well-behaved children with presents and punishing misbehaved children with lumps of coal.

As a child, I remember being horrified at my father’s stories about La Befana. I remember thinking how lucky I was to be growing up in Canada where we were visited by sweet and harmless Santa Claus. Of course now that I’m older and I understand more of the folklore behind La Befana, I sometimes wish that I could be in Italy to take part in so many of the traditions that continue through the holiday season, beyond Christmas and New Year’s.

As the years go by, I sometimes find myself dissatisfied with how we celebrate the “holiday season” because we tend to focus on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve and forget that in actual fact, the holiday season is a time that spans the period between Christmas and the Epiphany. It’s supposed to be a time of light and joy. Being of an Italian background, there are so many customs and traditions, now long abandoned, that mark each day of the holiday season. Sometimes I feel that in the desire to satisfy the commercial aspect of the holidays, we forget that really, we’re supposed to be having fun throughout this entire period.

So I wanted to commemorate the Epiphany and La Befana this year for two reasons.

First of all, as I get older, rather than constantly complain about how much this or that sucks, I’ve decided that I should shut up and actually do something to change what I don’t like. And since I don’t like how we seem to focus on the wrong things during the holidays, I’ve decided to not complain (for a change) and do something about it.

While I didn’t get a visit at all from La Befana (not sure what I would have done with a lump of coal anyway …), I did put out a little La Befana doll ornament that I have and I also ensured that all our Christmas decorations remained up. We have dutifully lit the Christmas tree and will enjoy its lights for one last time before the beginning of the Christmas season next December (never too early to start planning …).

But the other way that I’ve chosen to make a change is by actually baking for this special day. The cookies pictured above are called La Befana’s Stars and they’re from Gina DePalma’s amazing cookbook: Dolce Italiano. If you’re interested in baking and in Italian sweets, I strongly urge you to make this book yours.

These cookies also give me the opportunity to mention a very good cause associated with this book. In September 2008, Sara of Ms. Adventures in Italy, Jenn of The Leftover Queen and Michelle of Bleeding Espresso hosted an event called O Foods for Ovarian Cancer. I heard about the event through a post on the event by the Happy Cook on her blog My Kitchen Treasures.

The event highlighted the important battle against ovarian cancer and also highlighted Gina DePalma’s own battle with the disease. Gina has been bravely documenting her journey on her site.

While I was unable to take part in the event, it was never far from my mind and so I wanted to make these cookies as a way of showing my support for this tremendous effort on the part of food bloggers everywhere.

Epiphany is a word that doesn’t just refer to a religious holiday, it’s also a word that’s used to describe the sense of having a revelation or of discovering something new. It can mean that something finally makes sense or that you finally realize or truly get something.

I hope 2009 is a year of epiphanies for all of us!

Ciao!

Happy 2009, everyone! Thanks so much for all your well wishes over the holidays. December flew by and it’s hard to believe that we’re already a week into January 2009!

I’ve taken a bit of extra time off over the holidays but I have lots of posts and projects planned for the months ahead.

Starting next Monday, you will also see the return of Magazine Mondays (with a little surprise). I’d like to thank my dear friend Wandering Coyote of the blog ReTorte who stepped up and hosted Magazine Mondays throughout the month of December. I really appreciate it!

So here’s hoping you’ll join me next Monday. Remember, all you have to do to take part is send me a link to a recipe from a magazine that you’ve posted on your blog!

Ciao