Boston Bakery Crawl - Sweet Bakery and Georgetown Cupcakes

Sweet Cupcakes and Georgetown Cupcake - visited July 10, 2016

After Flour, I hit two cupcakeries on my walk. One was Sweet Bakery which was (almost surprisingly) empty when I walked in. In fact, it looked so deserted, I thought it was closed. But I walked in and someone came in from the back. I wonder if the quiet was due to their location as it wasn’t on a very busy part of Massachusetts Avenue. Their flavors seemed like the typical chocolate, vanilla, red velvet but there were also less typical flavors such as Cappuccino and Root Beer Float.  I myself scored a caramel macchiato cupcake (it was the last one left).

I thought it was pretty delicious. The cupcake was a bit on the small side, similar to the “normal” size that Kara’s Cupcakes does and smaller than Sprinkles. Too much frosting for me but the cupcake itself had a really nice crumb and the perfect moist cakey texture. The flavor wasn’t too strong and I had been hoping for a caramel filling but alas, it was just cupcake with a mound of frosting. I liked the frosting for the flavor but there was just too much of it for this non-frosting person. That’s the downside of cupcakes. With the exception of Sibby’s, almost all of the cupcakeries I’ve tried top the cupcakes with a ton of frosting. Some people love that. Unfortunately I’m not one of them. Still, I thought it was a good cupcake and not at all representative of the empty shop I walked into.

On the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of patronage was Georgetown Cupcake. I went to the one on Newbury Street and there was a small line out the door when I arrived and the shop was full. I had ample time to take pictures of the cupcakes arranged behind the glass cases and make my cupcake selections of Salted Caramel and Vanilla. Normally I get red velvet or chocolate when trying a new place for the first time but I’ve learned to also judge a bakery by its vanilla products. Why? It’s not hard to make a really great chocolate cupcake and most people love chocolate. Vanilla, in my mind, is so simple and sometimes the simple flavors are the hardest to do really well. So I thought I’d test out Georgetown on the vanilla flavor spectrum.

Both cupcakes were good. Once again too much frosting for me but that’s par for the course. I wished for more salted caramel in the salted caramel cupcake as most of it came from the dollop on top of the frosting. This is another case where I wished they had put it in as a filling like Kara’s does. 

The vanilla was also good. I have to confess though – maybe it was because I ate the cupcakes the day after I bought them and not right when I walked out of the shop but I thought they were just good, not spectacular. Given the crowd at the shop, I had expected spectacular. Glad I got to try them though but between Georgetown and Sweet, I’d say the cupcake from Sweet was a tad more moist and more fluffy.

Boston Bakery Crawl - Flour

Boston: Flour Bakery - visited July 9, 2016

Earlier this month, I flew to Boston to attend a good friend’s wedding. It had to be a quick trip as it was a busy time at work but I wouldn’t have missed seeing my friend Kendra get married. I took the redeye on Thursday night (note to self, “first class” on United does not mean the seats recline flat nor does it even provide access to the airport lounge so it was a total ripoff; #neveragain), arrived in Boston Friday morning, the wedding was on Friday night, there was a post-wedding brunch on Saturday morning, I hung out with my friend Rebecca afterwards then I took the “T” (Boston’s subway) to my hotel in Back Bay to spend Saturday afternoon through Sunday afternoon in Boston.

I love Boston. I haven’t been back in almost 7 years but I love Boston. As a tourist, I love the ease of getting around the city, I love the history and, being me, I love exploring the places to eat, namely the new-to-me bakeries.

Like any good foodie, I did my homework ahead of time to see which places I wanted to visit that were in walking distance of my hotel. From mid-afternoon Saturday to early afternoon Sunday, I had time to hit 4 bakeries and the Shake Shack, all fortunately within a few miles each way or less from my hotel. 

First stop was Flour. It was listed as one of the Top 10 Bakeries in Boston on the lists I’d checked. Thanks to comfy sandals and GPS on my phone, I reached Flour without incident and found it pretty bustling for a Saturday afternoon. I’m used to most bakeries doing the height of their business in the mornings (for the fresh baked bread) and running out of baked goods in the late afternoon.

Flour was still pretty well stocked and doing brisk business. It had the added advantage of offering sandwiches, salads and soups and a large enough area to accommodate tables and counter height seating so it was more like a café than a bakery. As clichéd as it was, I couldn’t resist buying a slice of Boston cream pie (when in Boston….) as well as a milk chocolate hazelnut cookie. As a rule, I don’t buy cookies at bakeries unless they look really compelling. This cookie ($2 price tag) was more modest but I’d tried Flour’s chocolate chip cookie recipe from their baking book and wanted a taste of it from their bakery.

It was okay. See, this is why I rarely buy bakery cookies because I’m such an awful cookie snob. There was nothing wrong with the cookie but it was also something I could easily make and I would probably have enjoyed it better if I had eaten it within 10 minutes of it coming out of my oven when it was still warm.

The Boston Cream Pie was more promising. Y’all know a Boston cream pie isn’t actually a pie but a cake, right? I know, it’s confusing. But true. Boston cream pie is layers of yellow cake filled with vanilla custard and topped with chocolate icing. Not a thin glaze, not a thick frosting but an icing that covers the top completely but only dribbles down the sides. I am not fond of custard-y filling unless it’s the pastry cream I make so Boston cream pie isn’t one of my favorite desserts. This one was pretty good though. I couldn’t eat very much of it because I’d already had (more than) my share of desserts by the time I tried it but for $6, they gave me a fairly good-sized piece and the cake was done well. The custard filling kept the cake moist and the fudge icing nicely complemented the yellow cake.

Stay tuned for the rest of my bakery crawl/visit.

Nutella No-Bake Cookies

Nutella No-Bake Cookies - made June 24, 2016 from Inside Bru Crew Life

I’ve mentioned often enough that I don’t do well in heat. So it’s a good thing I live in a moderate climate. But we do get our heat waves and when that happens, the last thing I want to do is turn on my oven. Yet oddly enough, I don’t really do a lot of no-bake cookies or desserts. I’m a baker, I like to bake. That means putting stuff in the oven and having them come out better than when they went in. “No bake” defies all that and I had a certain amount of prejudice against it.

I say “had” because, as mentioned in an earlier post, I am teachable and willing to change my mind with the right recipe. Which this proved to be. This cookie couldn’t have been easier to put together – you boil some ingredients, stir until smooth, add oats and coconut then shape into cookies. Let set and there you go. But it wasn’t just the ease of making it over my stovetop and not having to turn on the oven. It was that these had the consistency of fudge. Yes, fudge, the bane of my dessert-making existence because I can never get it to come out right.

Turns out I should’ve just been making no-bake cookies and substituting them for fudge. Who knew? And why didn’t they tell me? Okay, these aren’t exactly like fudge, unless you make your fudge with oats. But still, they’ll do in a pinch if you want something rich, chocolaty and super easy to make. Even if you’re not a coconut lover, you actually can’t taste the coconut in this cookie; the flavor gets drowned out by the chocolate and Nutella. I suspect the coconut is just there for filling and to give the cookie some structure and texture.

The only issue I had is I used whole oats and they were a tougher, chewier texture than creamy, dreamy fudge would allow. It wasn’t too bad but next time I would probably add the oats while the mixture was in its final boil and give it a chance to soften up a tad. Otherwise, this is a good cookie in the no-bake category. A category that before this only held Rice Krispie Treats in my dessert repertoire. I just doubled my no-bake assets, ha.

8 tablespoons butter

2 cups sugar
1/4 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 cup nutella
2 cups quick oats
3 cups sweetened shredded coconut

1. Place the butter, sugar, cocoa, milk, salt and vanilla in a saucepan over medium heat and stir until melted and smooth. Bring to a boil; boil 1 minute while stirring constantly.
2. Remove pan from heat and stir in nutella until smooth and creamy. Add the oats and coconut and stir until combined and coated.
3. Drop by large spoonfuls onto parchment paper. Flatten and shape, if desired. Let set until completely cooled. Store in a sealed container.

Cookie Butter Not-Quite-So-Lava Cake

Cookie Butter Not-Quite-So-Lava Cake - made June 18, 2016, adapted from Chocolate & Vanilla by Gale Gand

After making the Nutella Molten Lava Cakes and still on an obsessive kick to use my new 4^th of July ramekins (hang in there, it usually takes me at least a month (or more) to work through obsessive use of my new toys), I was struck with the brilliant idea of doing a cookie butter version of lava cake. It seemed like such an amazing idea, I don’t know why other people hadn’t thought of it before. I combed through pinterest, figuring someone must’ve stumbled onto this piece of sheer baking brilliance and would have a recipe I could try.

Alas, no. I seemed to be alone in my mind on this one. There were lava cakes for chocolate, peanut butter, even lemon. But not cookie butter. I didn’t want to make a chocolate lava cake and just drop cookie butter in the middle because I don’t like chocolate with cookie butter. But I do like it with vanilla so I thought I could make a vanilla cake with cookie butter “lava” flowing out of it. Come on, how hard could it be? Take a light vanilla cake recipe, bake in ramekins at a high temp to set the sides with a center of cookie butter. The concept was supposed to be the same so that when you upended the vanilla cake onto a plate, forked into it while it was still warm, all this wonderful cookie butter deliciousness would come flowing out.

Welp. Once again, it was a brilliant idea in my mind but when it came to actual execution, it fell a bit flat. I found this recipe for a lemon-vanilla cake in one of my baking books and I modified it to omit the lemon and just be a plain vanilla cake. But then I ended up not baking at such a high temp because I was afraid of burning the top while the middle stayed raw. While “raw” oozing chocolate batter is equated with decadent goodness, I’m afraid raw vanilla cake batter is just….raw vanilla cake batter. So I ended up fully baking the vanilla cake.

My “lava” cookie butter filling? It decided to spread out, sink to the bottom because it was heavier than the cake batter and bake itself as a thin bottom layer of the cake. Yep, you guessed it. Fail. Not only was it not lava-like at all but it was more like a bottom-turned-over-top “crust” on top of the cake. It wasn’t hard or crusty but it wasn’t molten either. Okay, lesson from this failure is pure cookie butter doesn’t stay put, doesn’t stay molten and has a mind of its own to bake itself along with the cake. If I want it to stay molten, I will have to find something else to add to it to keep the cookie butter flavor intact but also to keep it liquid and prevent it from baking. Or freeze scoops of it and push it in the center halfway through baking. Back to the drawing board.

Fortunately, the experiment wasn’t entirely a failure as the cake itself turned out to be pretty delicious.

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

1 cup whole milk
4 large eggs
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons vanilla bean paste (optional)
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Generously butter and flour at least twelve 4 ounce-6 ounce ramekins.
2. Combine butter and milk in medium saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil; set aside.
3. In an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, whip the eggs on medium-high speed until light and fluffy, 5 to 7 minutes. Reduce the speed to medium and stir in the sugar, vanilla and vanilla bean paste, if using.
4. On low speed, gradually add the flour. Pour in the hot milk mixture then add the baking powder and stir until batter is thoroughly combined.
5. Divide batter evenly amongst prepared ramekins. Drop a generous tablespoon of cookie butter in the center of each ramekin and cover completely with batter.
6. Bake 20-25 minutes, depending on size of ramekins or until golden and toothpick inserted near the sides (avoid cookie butter filling) comes out with a few moist crumbs.
7. Loosen sides with small spatula. After a few minutes, overturn ramekin onto plate. Leave overturned for 10 minutes before removing. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

Maple Biscuits

Maple Biscuits - made June 25, 2016 from Just Add Salt

One of my favorite takeaways from our Just Add Salt event was their maple biscuits. Linda, the owner, made these for us to have with the dishes we had cooked for dinner and at the end of the event, she gave each of us a packet of recipes which included said biscuits. You can’t imagine how psyched I was because these biscuits were amazing. I have a weakness for good biscuits, in case you can’t tell.

I had to make these twice though as the first time, I followed the recipe instructions but there was a typo in them and I ended up not adding the right amount of maple syrup to the dough. A clarifying question posted to Just Add Salt’s Facebook page gave me the correct instructions so I made a second attempt. Although I have to say even the first attempt with only half of the maple syrup was pretty delicious too, especially warm and slathered with melting butter.

The texture of these is somewhere between a flaky biscuit and a good, moist cornbread without the grittiness of the corn. Try it and see what I mean. You won’t be sorry.

3 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 pound (2 sticks) butter, cut into cubes
1/2 cup plus 4 tablespoons maple syrup, divided
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 egg
Fleur de sel

1. Up to 2 days ahead: in a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
2. Using a pastry cutter or stand mixer with paddle attachment, cut in the cubed butter until it resembles small peas. Stir in 1/2 cup of maple syrup and buttermilk until the dough just comes together (it will still be clumpy). Do not overwork the dough.
3. On a lightly floured surface, gently press or roll the dough into 1 1/2-inch thickness. Cut the biscuits using a 2-inch round cutter; you should have 16 biscuits. Refrigerate biscuits for at least 2 hours or up to 2 days. You can also freeze the biscuits until ready to bake.
4. When ready to bake: preheat oven to 425 degrees F. In a small bowl, whisk the egg and 1 tablespoon hot water. Brush the chilled biscuits with the egg wash and top each piece with a pinch of fleur de sel.
5. Bake the biscuits until they just begin to brown, about 18-22 minutes. Remove from oven. Quickly drizzle 1 teaspoon of the remaining maple syrup over each biscuit, then place the biscuits back in the oven for 2 minutes more. Serve while still warm.

Molten Chocolate Nutella Lava Cakes

Molten Chocolate Nutella Lava Cakes - made June 16, 2016, adapted from Veggie and the Beast Feast

I rarely have true cravings. Sure, I’ll feel like having a particular food once in awhile (typically dessert) but not with that “I must have this and only this RIGHT now” feeling. I didn’t with this one either but every once in awhile, I’ll be surfing pictures and recipes on pinterest, something will catch my eye, I’ll think it looks good and I’ll simply make it then and there.

Such was the case with this recipe for molten chocolate Nutella cakes. And let’s be honest, I wanted to use my 4^th of July ramekins again. They’re actually a bit big for lava cakes since molten chocolate cakes are typically very rich and best consumed warm so you don’t want too much in one serving. I went with them anyway because that’s what I wanted to use but I’d say these are best split with 3 other regular people or 1-2 chocoholics.

This is prepared like a typical lava cake – beat the eggs a lot to get the volume in the batter and airiness in baking, bake at a high temp and take out when the sides are done and middle is still jiggly for the molten chocolate part. The only change is adding the dollop of Nutella in the center before baking so there is guaranteed molten lava upon serving.

It looks burned but it actually isn't

Mine didn’t turn out as pretty as the original blog but that was probably because I released the cake from the ramekin too early and it broke apart while it was too hot and fragile. It didn’t affect the taste but if you don’t want your cake to break too soon,  let it cool a few minutes before turning over onto a plate then leave it overturned but with the ramekin still in place to hold it together while it cools for a few minutes more before you remove the ramekin.

I warned ahead of time but I’ll warn again – this is rich. The Nutella makes it so but there’s also still the chocolate batter in the middle that has enough time to heat up but not enough time to fully bake. The two together make for a formidable assault on your sweet tooth and tolerance of decadence. My tolerance is quite high but even I was almost defeated by half a serving of one ramekin. So arm yourself with vanilla ice cream when you take on this chocolate goodness, just to give yourself a fighting chance.

4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate chips
1 egg
1 egg yolk
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon cocoa powder
2 tablespoons Nutella
2 teaspoons powdered sugar, optional, for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Generously grease two 7-ounce ramekins.
2. Combine the butter and chocolate in the top half of a double boiler over simmering water. Whisk until melted and smooth,
3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg, egg yolk, sugar and salt on high until thickened and pale, 3-4 minutes. Scrape down the sides of bowl as needed.
4. Whisk the cocoa powder into the melted chocolate then fold mixture into eggs just until incorporated. Do not overmix.
5. Divide batter evenly between ramekins. Drop 1 tablespoon Nutella in the center of each ramekin.
6. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until the sides are firm and the centers are still soft but not juggly.
7. Let cakes cool for 1 minute in the ramekins then set a plate face-down on top of each ramekin. While wearing an oven mitt, carefully flip the ramekin and plate over. Let stand for 10 seconds then carefully lift the ramekin.
8. Sift a little powdered sugar on top of each cake, garnish with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and serve warm,