use real butter

Recipe: peach-raspberry galette

Peaches were on sale at the local Safeway when I passed through on Sunday. These aren’t the kind of peaches that are juicy and make a mess down your shirt when you bite into one, but they looked good enough for some fruity ideas.

Recipe: thin crust pizza

We like to make pizza at home because it’s delicious, fresh, and most of all – I hate disposing of that damned giant cardboard box when we order from our local (only) pizza takeout joint in town. The shameful truth is, Jeremy makes the pizza dough. I’m the cook, but I’ve never made the pizza dough before. He just tried it one evening and it was great, and ever since then he has been the goto pizza dough boy. Actually, he used the Crusty Pizza Dough recipe from the KitchenAid stand mixer recipe book that comes in the box and I have to (bashfully) admit that he did this because I was afraid to use my KitchenAid mixer. Ridiculous (me), I know!

I had always mixed my double batches of cookie dough by hand. I figured it helped maintain my hitting arm for volleyball. I didn’t trust the shiny white KitchenAid that my dear sweet in-laws had given to me for my birthday. It sat on the counter for well over a year before I ventured to test it out.

**Jump for more butter**

Recipe: mocha hazelnut torte

After making a chiffon cake with swiss meringue buttercream, I usually wind up with at least a dozen egg yolks. I saw that David Lebovitz posted about using up egg whites which is the opposite of my problem. While perusing my old Chocolatier issues, I found a recipe from 1994 that uses at least ten egg yolks (more, if you go all out on the plating). Sweet! Except it’s a three truffle recipe. It doesn’t mean the recipe is necessarily difficult in terms of skill level, rather – it means there are several steps. That’s fine, I thought.

I had made the espresso pastry cream a day ahead because I knew doing all of the steps in one day would put me in a foul mood. Fine – that worked out alright. The recipe didn’t say to strain the pastry cream through a sieve. I am here to tell you to definitely do so. I like my pastry cream to be smoooooooth. The next morning I baked the chocolate genoise which turns out to be a little more brittle than I expect from genoise, but I was cool with it. While the genoise was cooling on a rack, I started on the hazelnut meringue. The first step was to skin some hazelnuts. God, I hate skinning hazelnuts. It’s fairly straightforward, just roast the hazelnuts on a baking sheet for about 10 minutes and then wrap them up in a kitchen towel to cool. When they heat up, they expand and bust their skins. When they cool, they shrink and will theoretically release from the skins with ease. Theoretically. My advice is to roast 25% more hazelnuts than called for because some of those suckers will refuse to release.

**Jump for more butter**