I've been cutting back a lot of good things out of my diet: mainly meat, eggs, and dairy. That's put a kink into my cooking, to say the least.

But I figure Valentine's Day is a special occasion, so I returned (much like a canine to his regurgitation) to my bad habits and made some sticky buns for my wife.

From Valentine's Day Cinnamon Buns

I've been playing with cinnamon buns for the last year or so, and have found they offer a high return on investment. They're not nearly so difficult to make as they look, and almost everyone loves them.

There's some room for variety with cinnamon rolls: I generally make way too much caramel and turn them into a sort of a caramel bun. But recently I've been making a simple butter frosting and serving them that way instead.

From Valentine's Day Cinnamon Buns

Probably my favourite variation is to put raisins in them, although Ames isn't such a huge fan. One interesting twist I tried was chopping a couple apples finely and rolling bits of chopped apple into the cinnamon spiral. That worked out rather well.

I use the simple cinnamon bun recipe I found in A Century of Canadian Home Cooking. The buns are chewy and soft, but they don't age well and feel stale within a couple days. Not like that's generally a problem.

We got up early, made some coffee, and ate fresh hot cinnamon buns. That was a great way to start the day.

From Valentine's Day Cinnamon Buns

Baking Day

It's only been fairly recently that I realized Americans really don't do butter tarts. You'd think I'd've noticed before now: since I moved to the States I've only seen and eaten butter tarts when I've been home visiting. Apparently they're a Canadian treat, who knew?

If you're not familiar with butter tarts, they're a delectable caramel confection, much like a southern pecan pie, but not as gelatinous. The filling is mainly butter and sugar. When I was growing up, they always had raisins in them, but they're not raisin tarts: the raisins are more of an adjunct than a main ingredient. The end result is a sort of caramel tart with a buttery, slightly gooey center.

From Baking day

Butter tarts aren't for the faint of heart. These little guys are pancreatic death bombs. If you've got blood sugar problems, or if diabetes runs in your family, or if you know someone with blood sugar problems, or if you've ever heard the word "pancreas"; you should probably avoid these guys like the plague. They'll kill you.

But today I was going to be deserted by wife and children for the day, so I decided to do some Christmas baking. And what says Christmas to an ex-pat Canadian, like fresh butter tarts? So I took out Mum's butter tart recipe, got my French press going, put on Christmas with the Academy, and settled in for a baking day.

The first order of business was baking some bread. I've experimented with bread off-and-on for the last four years: I've had some success with yeast breads, but sourdough hasn't been quite so easy. I began a new sourdough starter with the dregs of some beer I made last month, and it's been doing all right. We've made a couple things with it, and last night I decided to make some bread. It was looking pretty good this morning, having fermented all night, so into the oven it went.

From Baking day

It's not amazing bread, but it's the best sourdough I've been able to make yet. I think the problem is that I'm not letting the dough rise sufficiently after I shape it into loaves. I'm pretty good about letting it rise basically as long as it takes, but once I shape it I tend to throw it into the oven. I'm going to experiment with that a little more in the future.

Bread done, it was time to make tarts. I've never made tarts before, of any kind at all. I was planning on using a muffin tin to bake them, but Ames showed me this pan:

From Baking day

I said, "Oh! I didn't know we had a tart pan."

She responded, "This isn't a tart pan."

Not wanting to betray my ignorance, I merely nodded knowingly. I have no idea what kind of pan that is, and am too embarrassed to ask.

At any rate, I took our not-a-tart-pan and started assembling tarts.

From Baking day

The first batch didn't turn out the best. I made two rookie mistakes: first, I over-filled the tarts so that the centers overflowed the shells and left a real mess on my pans.

From Baking day

Second, I let them sit too long before I tried to remove them from the pan. This meant the sugar hardened into a sort of cement, and I ended up tearing several tarts apart trying to get them out of the non-tart pan.

From Baking day

So I made another batch. This time I greased the pan, carefully measured out a smaller portion of center per tart, and removed them while they were still dangerously hot. The result: I got a decent pan of tarts.

From Baking day

From Baking day

It was frankly pretty nice to taste something so like home. I'd forgotten how great these little guys are. All told, I made something like 30 tarts, and most of them are still intact. I think I'll need to make another couple dozen before Christmas.

Butter tarts out of the way, I got working on dinner: Chicken and Pastry.

From Baking day

Yeah, today was a good day.

There's still a lot of Christmas baking to do. I've not made Stollen yet this year, and I'm planning on at least one batch of ridiculously over-caramelled cinnamon buns. And it seems like I haven't made a pie in years.

But today was a nice way to get into Christmas.

Unexpected arrival

We made pizza last night. And it was good. Really good. Really, really good. I think we've finally figured out how to make good pizza.

From Really Good Pizza

The crust was thin but chewy, with lots of air bubbles and a definite structure; but it was soft and bready, not pastry-like.

From Really Good Pizza

The crust is certainly the single most important factor to good pizza. We started out making the dough he night before, refrigerating it immediately, and letting it rise just before using it. That worked very well, but we thought we could do better. We've tried several different things to make it better, but we've really only been able to improve a single aspect of the crust at a time; at the cost of others.

This time we made the crust the night before, let it rise and punched it down a few times overnight, and portioned it into crust-size dough balls the next day, which we refrigerated until an hour or so before we used them.

I've been told the secret to good bread is to let it rise many times. All my experiments appear to confirm this statement. Certainly this last batch of pizzas seems to do so.

From Really Good Pizza

So I guess we can stop making pizza now. We appear to be at the top of our game.

I only wanted a cheesbuhguh!

I'm not a big fan of that quintessential American food, the burger. I'd rather have a dog with chili and jalapenos any day. But the love of my life esteems burgers roughly equivalently to how I think of pizza, so I've been trying to learn to make the perfect burger.

I started with Alton Brown's Burger of the Gods recipe, which is basically just ground meat, salt, and pepper. The advice about being careful not to over-work the meat is sound: I've learned the hard way that burgers are best when the meat is only "lightly tossed" with the salt and pepper.

From Cheeseburger

We've been cooking them on a griddle, with a flatten on the flip. I form the meat into balls and throw them on the griddle. When they're browned on the bottom, they get flipped and pressed flat with the spatula to form a patty.

From Cheeseburger

Flattening them takes some practice. I'm not an expert yet, but I've been working on it...

From Cheeseburger

From Cheeseburger

Of course cheese is necessary for a cheeseburger.

From Cheeseburger

It needs to be added on the griddle so it melts properly.

From Cheeseburger

It can overcook pretty easily, so I keep an eye on it as it cooks.

From Cheeseburger

Then off to the bun.

From Cheeseburger

But I've been having trouble with getting a good hamburger bun. Last week I tried a Kaiser roll recipe I found, but they weren't quite the ticket. Don't get me wrong: the recipe worked reasonably well. But the rolls weren't quite what I was looking for. So today I tried the perfect burger bun recipe on Annie's Eats. This might be the one I've been looking for.

From Cheeseburger

I'm the first to admit that Annie's look better than mine, but these are at least respectable.

From Cheeseburger

Annie's recipe calls for bread flour: I just used the same unbleached all-purpose flour I use for everything else. I let the dough rise twice before shaping it, to try and get a little more yeast action. I figured that might make up for my flour choices.

From Cheeseburger

From Cheeseburger

This might well be the bun recipe I was hoping to find. I have to say, the finished product was good.

From Cheeseburger

And ultimately, it got the results I've been hoping for.

From Cheeseburger

The Right Recipe

My daughter made up a little ditty in honour of the Atkins diet (to the tune of "Frere Jacques"):

Carbohydrates, carbohydrates,

Make you fat, make you fat!

If you want to be thin, if you want to be thin,

Then eat meat. Then eat meat.

I've been making a lot of bread. I can't shake that tune from my head.


I finally decided to try the "French Bread" recipe that came with the French Loaf Pan I got from Williams-Sonoma. You know, the one I ranted about...

I baked these on Tuesday:

From Bread

From Bread

And these came out of the oven ten minutes ago:

From Bread

Compare with the recipe I developed:

From Bread

Mine aren't bad, but they're a little pale. And they were a little drier too.

Actually, the recipes aren't that different. I only realized that this week, when I looked it over to try it. I think the big difference is brushing egg white on the loaves before baking. I've been over-baking mine, trying to get them nicely browned. I'm going to retry my recipe in the next week or so and see if brushing egg on them makes the difference.

Here's to carbohydrates!

From Bread

The right pan

I was given one of these French Loaf Pans as a gift. I must say, the right pan helps incredibly with the finished product.

From Bread

Those loaves are my own "recipe." I'm actually kinda proud of them...

A grip on life

So my experiments with pizza have led into the wider realm of sourdough.

The offspring and I decided to get a good sourdough going after we realized that great pizza just might require sourdough. Our first attempt was to capture wild yeast on the counter. We tried to work with it, but it was a constant disappointment.

Our second attempt was a grape-based starter. The grape-based starter appears to be working. We made pizza first. This was our first no-dry-yeast pizza attempt, and it worked admirably.

(I know the first pizza picture is blurry: we had some camera issues that night, and I salvaged what I could.)

From Grip on Life

From Grip on Life

I decided to try bread after that, but my starter was sluggish. I ended up making a few loaves, but I cheated and spiked the dough with dry yeast. Still, they were decent:

From Grip on Life

From Grip on Life

I used a slight variation on the Berkeley Sourdough I found online. I found the recipe made an extremely dry dough, so I use more starter than they recommend, add the water and salt to it, and then knead in flour to form a decent consistency. The results seem pretty good.

From Grip on Life

I fed my sourdough again this weekend, and it got really foamy. So I started a new batch tonight. In fact, the sponge I made to get the bread going was foaming nicely enough that I made it into a dough much earlier than I had planned. I'm leaving the dough out on the counter overnight to rise. I'll see how it's doing in the morning.


I must admit I've been intrigued with the catalogue Sourdoughs International has online. I'm more than a little tempted to drop some cash on a starter from them. But frankly, I'm out $20 or so in flour and $5 in grapes right now, and that's produced a good deal of pizza and bread already. Part of my interest has been that this hobby is so cheap; I'm going to keep seeing what I can hack together in my kitchen before I start ordering more exotic starters online.