Brioche and croissant are both Viennoiserie (breakfast pastries) but the preparation is quite different. Croissant dough calls for multiple folds of a simple yeast dough and butter (lamination) for its distinctive flakiness, while Brioche owes its softness and tenderness to the butter and eggs that are added directly to the…
Before opening my retail pastry shop in Vineyard Haven, I baked for an extended summer season out of the porch of my house in Chilmark. In addition to producing desserts for several island restaurants, a daily assortment of Viennoiseries came out of my commercial convection oven. While they were primarily…
Pain au Chocolat combines two of the world’s best food creations; croissant and chocolate. Pastry shops use a 3-inch piece of chocolate, called a baton, for their pain au chocolat. For the home baker, slivers of chocolate cut from your favorite semi or bittersweet chocolate bar work fine. A warm…
When someone would ask me to name my favorite thing to bake at my Martha’s Vineyard pastry shop Seven Layers, the answer was easy – Croissant. I absolutely loved the process of making croissant as well as the time of day they were produced. I would arrive at the shop…
Crème Caramel is a French baked custard that delights with a silky-smooth texture as well as the wonderful interplay of the caramel with the vanilla infused custard. The smooth texture is the result of its gentle baking in a water bath. The soft caramel on top is derived from lining…
Quite a few years ago, my middle brother and I were guests at a Seder hosted by a dear friend of our mother’s. Margaret was a lovely woman—an Austrian immigrant, very calm and soft-spoken—and the only person I knew growing up who had concentration camp numbers tattooed on her arm.…
For this week’s blog I will discuss the process of designing, testing and refining a cake, from the overall design to the specifics of all the components. Constructing a Dacquoise had been on The Friday Baking Project do-list for some time and with my favorite roasted hazelnut flour around the…
Lemon Meringue Pie is an American classic, and an easy choice for this year’s Pi Day (3/14) pie. In the traditional recipe, where a small mountain of Basic Meringue is spread over a lemon filling, the ratio of meringue to filling is skewed too heavily toward the meringue. Additionally, while…
The Friday Baking Project
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