Tuesdays with Dorie: Brown-Sugar Oat Squares

This week's recipe came together so quickly and easily.  I was wishing I'd known about this recipe in the days when it was more often than I needed a last minute takealong snack for a small group.  All of the ingredients can be found in your pantry.  It doesn't even need an egg.  The whole recipe comes together fast in the bowl of your food processor.

My family loves anything with oats.  Add in some butter, sugar, and spices and these were delicious.  The caramelized flavor of the brown sugar, combined with the allspice and cinnamon was delicate and well-balanced.  

As others mentioned, the only tricky part was inverting the warm bars, slicing then returning them to the pan.  I will take their lead in the future and use a parchment sling.  To make things a bit more challenging, I got distracted after taking these out of the oven and didn't do those steps until the bars were barely warm.  I lost quite a few of the oats on top but sprinkled them over the baked and cut bars anyway.  I cut mine into triangles to get a few more pieces because I planned to take them to a meeting.  They were gone in no time!

Next time you need a quick and tasty treat, follow the Brown-Sugar Oat Squares recipe from Baking with Dorie:  Sweet, Salty & Simple.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Coffee Shortbread from Baking with Dorie

 My bake for this week was coffee shortbread.  This recipe went together quickly with a few simple ingredients.

After reading Dorie's instructions not to overmix, I was concerned that maybe I had undermixed when I tried to press the crumbly mix into the prepared pan.  Pressing a fork in to create marks for the wedges only pulled up the crumbs so I followed others' input and didn't even try to mark the dough until after baking.  It still seemed quite crumbly so I used a tart pan bottom pressed to the baked circle before inverting.  I had my doubts that it would hold together but it did.  

I made a quick, simple glaze after the wedges cooled and sprinkled it with espresso powder.

Cardamom is not a flavor that I use frequently but I followed the recipe as written.  When my husband and I shared a piece of the shortbread, we both found it to have complex flavor.  The lemon zest, espresso, cardamom and the sea salt all came through to make a really delicious shortbread with a soft and crumbly texture.  I plan to take the rest to a gathering on Friday and I'm looking forward to seeing how the flavors and texture bloom.  I will definitely make this one again in the future.

The next time you need a simple recipe for tasty shortbread, try this one from Baking with Dorie:  Sweet, Salty & Simple.

Tuesdays with Dorie: Tender Biscuits from Baking with Dorie

For the first post of January, I chose Tender Biscuits.  I really enjoy biscuits, but I've probably only made them once.  They are so decadent; I try to limit eating them at restaurants that really do them well so that it keeps it to an infrequent calorie splurge.

I had plans to meet a friend who grew up in the south so it seemed like a good idea to time the baking with our art museum day.  

I mixed the yogurt and milk plus the dry ingredients the night before so I could get these mixed and baked early.  I used a pastry blender to incorporate the butter into the dry ingredients, as I always do with pastry crust.  When I added the wet ingredients, I was pretty sure I'd have a challenge bringing the dough together, as Dorie mentions.  I added additional milk gradually (adding a total of 3 tablespoons) so that I could mostly incorporate all of the ingredients.  I also added another teaspoon of sugar (for a total of one tablespoon) since I knew I'd be using these as sweet versus savory biscuits.  Once the dough was together, I cut four 2.5" round biscuits and put those in to bake.  I cut the rest plus the reshaped scraps into 2" round biscuits that would go into the freezer unbaked.

I suspect that I may have needed to add more liquid for one of two reasons.  Either the premixed liquids evaporated a bit in the refrigerator or that I should have cut the butter into smaller pieces than I typically do for pastry crust so the moisture in the more "flaked" butter could have helped to absorb more dry ingredients.

Regardless of the initial issue, the biscuits were really tasty.  They didn't need the additional teaspoon of sugar in order to make them seem like a sweet treat with a little bit of butter.  I'm looking forward to hearing my friend's report on how she liked the biscuits I gave her.  :-)  I told her not to hold me to her granny's standard.