Tuesdays With Dorie REPLICANT – Perfection Pound Cake

This pound cake turned out wonderfully. A little dry, but that’s poundcake for you. I pounded this cake at midnight on Monday, let it cool on the rack until 2am, and went to sleep shortly thereafter. I am tired.

The poun dcake was a smash at work – I always know people really like something when they ask for the recipe. I served it with orange marmalade, apple jelly, and raspberry jam. A FULL SPREAD FOR THE POUNDCA KE.

This is a cake I made for a coworker’s birthday.

Sorry for the late post – I was having trouble uploading the pics

Tuesdays With Dorie RESURRECTION – Hidden Berry Cream Cheese Torte

This was a scrumptious, dense, rich dessert – very much a cheesecake, even though we call it a torte for some reason. The berries are raspberries, and the whole thing came out perfectly. The work unit tore the thing apart.

Tuesdays With Dorie RESIDUE – Brown Sugar Pecan Shortbreads

I did a lot of things wrong, you guys. I rolled these too thin. I didn’t put them anywhere near “apart” from one another on the baking sheets. I’m 95% certain that I didn’t refrigerate them for anything close to the minimum 2 hours recommended.

So here they are – shortbreads that melted together into four giant shortbreadish cookies, and then were cut apart. I apologize for everything.

Tuesdays With Dorie RETRO – Quintuple Chocolate Brownies

Although Tuesdays With Dorie as we know it is quintuple dead, I’ll stay true to my word. I’m going to finish this book, which means doing the recipes that the group originally baked from January 2008 through July 1, 2008 (minus a few that I baked as extra credit during my original run). It took a little doing (the list of already-made recipes seems to have disappeared from the Internet to make way for the new book – how soon we forget – although my pal Archive.org has an older version of the list available), but now I’m on the case.

The quintuple chocolate brownies pictured here (for those counting at home, that’s cocoa powder, unsweetened chocolate, bittersweet chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate) are delicious. The white chocolate layer is not as thick, smooth, or pleasant as it looks in the book, but that’s not my MO anyway.

I almost screwed these up, and the whole thing went into the oven for three minutes before I realized that I had not added the dry ingredients. Thankfully, nothing had really heated up at that point and the brownies turned out great in another pan with flour, cocoa, and salt added.

Tuesdays With Dorie RIP – Kids Thumbprints

This is the type of cookie I would never have eaten as a kid. There’s too much nuttiness going on here. If it had just been peanut butter and jelly, I’d have been there.

As an adult, I love these. And true to my promise four years ago, I have not once made food look anything but ugly.

And so ends this chapter of Tuesdays With Dorie. I’d like to thank all of the people who have chosen recipes, and all of the people who have baked along or commented here (despite the fact that I rarely make comments on other pages), and to Laurie who started the group, and to Dorie for teaching me how to make great things out of butter and sugar.

This baking group has meant a lot to me over the past four years. Before I took the initiative to learn to bake, I had been struggling with disordered eating for several years. Tuesdays With Dorie was not only my first venture into making real food, but also a first step towards finding a place for all sorts of food in my life – the healthy and the not-so-healthy. It’s not a stretch to say that Tuesdays With Dorie has improved my quality of life – given me purpose, initiative, and most importantly, a deadline. I’ve made several virtual friendships and found a lot of fun and funny people to follow on Twitter, or on Facebook.

As I’ve indicated previously, I won’t be continuing with Tuesdays With Dorie in its new incarnation (starting in February at the above URL). Instead, I will be baking the first six months of the book we just finished (the group started in January 2008 and I didn’t join until July). After that, I’ll be doing some sort of food on Tuesdays – not necessarily baked goods, but always a recipe that I find interesting. Thanks to everybody who played along with me for the past four years. It’s been neat.

Tuesdays With Dorie – Chocolate Blueberry Ice Cream and Brrrrrrrrownies

This is last week’s “other” recipe, chocolate blueberry ice cream. Chocolate ice cream has never been my favorite (I’m a vanilla man through and through). For what it is, this is good. It’s not something I would go out of my way to make again (especially with my wife’s allergy to blueberries), but it was good enough to eventually finish.

This is my “rewind” for this week – I remade the peppermint-filled “Brrrrownies” for a holiday party at work. They were just as good as they were the first time.

Next week is the official end for “Tuesdays With Dorie,” at least in its current incarnation. I will not be joining in the new incarnation. Everybody, a moment of silence.

Tuesdays With Dorie – Puffed Double Plum? Tart and last week’s honey-almond fig? tart

This is the puffed double plum tart, or as I like to call it: the puffed pear/prune tart. Plums have disappeared from the grocery stores around here. There were no recommended suggestions, but I went with some red pears just because they would mirror some of the intended color of the plums.

This is pretty good. Apparently, year-old freezer-burnt puff pastry still puffs pretty impressively, and tastes great too. I polished off half the thing myself in a post-gym frenzy.

Plums must have gone out of season pretty quickly, because exactly one week ago today…

I couldn’t find figs, so I used plums as a replacement in the honey almond fig tart. The honey almond pastry creme is probably my favorite of the tart fillings that Dorie has done. The plums worked well with the creme. Dorie’s recommended replacements were summer stonefruits like peaches and nectarines. They were also no-can-do. Her only other suggestion was making this into a grapefruit tart, and I am strictly opposed to citrus desserts in the wintertime.

Speaking of desserts that are completely out of season, we continue our farewell tour through this cookbook and wrap up Tuesdays With Dorie over the next few weeks. Tomorrow night I tackle today’s secondary recipe: chocolate blueberry ice cream. Yep, nothing on a sub-freezing day like a nice cold bowl of icy fruity ice cream.

Tuesdays With Dorie – Earl Grey Madeleines, and last week’s Normandy Apple Tart

I’ve never been a tea fan and I’ve never been particularly happy with madeleines. This one will not change my mind on either count. I had some bags of Earl Grey left over from some earlier TWD recipe – possibly Far Breton? Anyway, here we are now with tea cookies.

This is last week’s Normandy Apple Tart, which I baked on Tuesday but didn’t include in my Tuesday post. I thought this was downright delicious, although it did not have a lot of sweetness to it. It disappeared at work before lunch, which is almost always a good sign. I made the extra effort to learn how to layer the apples appropriately, and hopefully that shows (despite the poor lighting).

Casey K: Pizza Hero

If you’re one of the few people that follows my lousy pizza blog, http://pizzashewrote.tumblr.com, you know that I recently had a disaster: my pizza stone shattered into a bajillion (four) pieces.

Since September, I’ve been despondent about the whole thing. My homemade pizzas have been the pits and I fell back on the worst things: DiGiorno. Newman’s Own. Tombstone. Off-brands. Pizza stopped becoming a glorious mission and started becoming sad.

About a week ago, I received a package in the mail. I didn’t open the package because I thought it was a gift I had ordered for a wedding. However, when a SECOND box came, I had a mystery to solve. Turns out that the first box was actually a pizza stone, sent by my pal Casey K.

Casey is one of my many friends from a long chain of Internet interaction that started on a forum years ago and trailed across social media until it landed on Google Reader, a content-based social network where like-minded and not-so-like-minded individuals could share thoughts and opinions on news and pictures of cats. As plain old stupid as this sounds, I count the people I spent time with on Google Reader among my good friends. Now Google is dead to me, and these people remain very much alive in various corners. Casey’s very generous move was just one instance where these people have shown that my super-weird affection is not only one-sided. I came out of writing retirement to write a nice blog for my pal and to express intent to take this good will and “pay it forward” in whatever way I can.

Since this is a food blog, I’ll leave you with some pizza, cooked deliciously and appropriately on this new pizza stone. Thanks, and the happiest of holidays to all.

The new pizza stone, topped with two dough-balls getting ready to go into the fridge for a three-day cold ferment

The first pizza off of the new stone – I apologize for the lighting, and the char never seems to come over very well on an iPhone camera.

A nice shot of the speckles of char on a well-cooked pizza pie.

Thanks, Casey. You can visit Casey at Tumblr or Twitter and tell him he’s a good dude.

Tuesdays With Dorie – Sour Cream Pumpkin Tart

I’ve had enough pumpkin pie over the past week (including one of Dorie’s caramel pumpkin pies, made by yours truly), so I decided to do this in tart form. The tart was delicious and the filling got rave reviews from coworkers. Because I used a tart shell, I had some filling left over, so I baked it in custard cups – for some reason, those came out a bit grainy, but still delicious.

I posted this without the apple tart because I won’t have it done by midnight Tuesday/Wednesday, and I want to stick by “Tuesdays.” Rest assured that the second recipe will follow on Wednesday.

For posterity, a picture of the caramel pumpkin pie that I made. The crust was a disaster. Not sure where I went wrong.