I love pie, so I decided to do some holiday season prep. I baked down the apples with some white and brown sugar, cornstarch, water, and spices (mostly following this recipe) and bagged them into single-pie portions. A week or two later I made a couple batches of pie dough, baked off one pie, and froze the rest.

Super worth doing - as long as I remember to defrost, I can put together a fresh pie in 10 minutes or so + bake time.

I was commissioned to make donuts for a friends wedding party. I convinced them that donuts are best as fresh as can be, so I prepped dough the night before and did cold-ferment before getting up early to fry and glaze.

I pretty much followed Serious Eats recipe directly, though I had to adjust for altitude. The last time I made donuts at altitude (Crested Butte for my sister-in-laws wedding party) I forgot my thermometer and had to gauge temp using a chopstick. This time, I looked it up properly and found I need to reduce my oil temp by 21℉, since I’m at 7000 feet, which worked perfectly.

For Aisha’s birthday this year she requested a Kinder Bueno inspired cake. Chocolate’s a bit of an unusual request for her, so I knew it had to be good.

My base recipe is one from Chelsweets: layers of shortbread, chocolate cake, hazelnut and white chocolate mouse, and a nutella frosting. The chocolate cake recipe was great!

I changed a few things:

• I made my shortbread from scratch, pressing into the bottom of my cake tins with a flat bottomed glass, then baking for around 20 minutes before pouring in my cake batter. This whole “cake baked directly on a cookie” was a first for me and worked very well.
• I swapped the American buttercream described in the original recipe for an Italian meringue buttercream, which is far superior. I had some issues with my buttercream deflating, but was able to rescue it (this seems to happen 4/5 times I do Italian meringue).
• I didn’t have enough left in our Costco size box of real Kinder Bueno bars, so simplified the decorations.

Kind of a novelty, but some interesting science. A single bake of batter forms layers hard custard, soft custard, and normal cake.

Simple summer treat.

• Homemade puff pastry cut into circles (not really tarts, since I don’t have a tart pan).
• Pastry cream
• Peach poached in vanilla and prosecco

A great Sunday treat. The dough came together pretty quick and easy and is a short rise. This pastry cream recipe is pretty foolproof due to the high amount of flour/starch—I didn’t have any issues with thickening. Filling the donuts without a real piping tip is a pain, but the creme/donut/chocolate combo is worth it.

Next time I make these, I’ll probably find a different chocolate glaze recipe. I had a few issues with this one - sifting powdered sugar and cocoa powder is really messy, but without sifting it’s hard to avoid clumps. I also am not generally a fan of powdered sugar based frostings, since the lack of heating leaves the sugar grains intact, and I can feel the grittiness.

A final note—the recipe says it’ll yield about a dozen, but I got 22 out of it using the recommended size.

I made a thin roll cake with this recipe from BBC Food, modified by adding a tablespoon or two of vegetable oil to add some moisture and liquid since I only have all-purpose flour.

That was spread with a whipped chocolate ganache (2:1 cream to ~60% dark chocolate). This is similar to one of the fillings of the wedding cake, but not stabilized. Here’s a good overview of chocolate ganache from Tessa Arias.

I made a chocolate Italian-meringue buttercream for the outer layer, which was a major headache. I managed to get my base frosting to the perfect texture after about 10 minutes of beating, but after adding ~50g of melted chocolate it softened like crazy, started to break, and would not recombine. After 20 more minutes of beating, moving in and out of the fridge, and putting on and off a double boiler I finally threw it in the fridge for half an hour and Aisha was finally able beat it back to the original texture.

Finally, I rolled, frosted, and striped with more melted chocolate. The airiness, and rich, real chocolate was amazing! I almost wished we hadn’t decided to give it away.

I’ve wanted to try baking with aquafaba (chickpea liquid) ever since I heard it could be used as a vegan egg substitute for baking.

It takes longer than egg white (but that may be my lack of a stand mixer) and is pretty magical once it starts forming peaks. Also: you don’t have to figure out what to do with extra egg yolk.

The final product is spot-on to the texture and taste of the egg-based equivalent.

Next, I want to try aquafaba for a Genoise-style cake batter…

While waiting, I made a roasted tomato sauce: 1 can diced tomatoes, a few tablespoons tomato paste, a small diced onion, and a few cloves of garlic. Saute until reduced, then roast in the oven at ~170℃ for 40 minutes.

Before prepping, I roasted brocoli and bell peppers for 30 minutes, sauted button mushrooms and onions, and seasoned everything.

Then I wrapped everything up in my dough, crimped the edges well, brushed with egg wash, and baked for around 35 minutes at 230℃.

After perusing the box-cake mix aisle in the grocery store I selected Betty Crocker brand MUG treats, chocolate chip cookie flavor.

The cooking process isn’t that complicated—add water (following the package instructions), mix, and cook. I kept the mix in the foil-lined paper packets it came in, which handled the heat just fine, and popped both in the jetboil side by side, leaving them open to allow the dough to rise.

The challenge is the Jetboil. They’re purpose built for one thing—boiling water fast, not cooking sous-vide or baking. To turn one into an oven you need to maintain high heat inside the pot while minimizing fuel loss and not damaging anything. Jetboils are well insulated but the base is thin, lightweight aluminum that needs to transfer heat.

To prevent scorching the bottom, I created a small trivet with folded aluminum foil (see pictures below). This lets me elevate the cooking food above a small amount of water at the base. A positive side effect of boiling water is steam, which helps breads rise. My trivet was about one centimeter high, but I’d recommend making it higher. The water boils off fast and needs replacing, which is difficult to do without dripping into the cake.

To minimize fuel loss keep the flame as low as possible, which is tricky with the Jetboil. For me, keeping it at the absolute minimum caused the flame to go out after a minute or so, so dialed it up a smidge.

This took a while, about 23 minutes, but the bake was surprisingly good! I’ll probably try a DIY mix next time since the store bought mix was very sweet.

This is my favorite pizza dough recipe, especially the instructions for shaping.

Doubled the recipe. I shredded frozen butter, and I think there was way too much—it felt like I had heartburn all night. Leftovers were surprisingly good cold.