Bouchon Bakery First Bake: Pecan Sandies

I didn't want just to bake out of Dorie Greenspan and I've had Thomas Keller: Bouchard Bakery which includes many recipes by Sebastian Rouxel who heads up the Bakery. I
decided to bake out of it as well. The beginning recipes are cookie recipes and the first recipe is for pecan sandies, baked by Thomas Keller's mom on a regular basis. The recipe is on page 10.

I had a great time with them and am on board with baking my way through this cookbook as well.

As a woman who owns four sets of measuring cups, I am delighted to acknowledge that I am now only using my scale. I use the cups to dip out whatever I am measuring, but I go by the scale altogether these days.

So first I weighed all the ingredients and had them prepped and ready:

I even weighed the individual cookies. They were supposed to weigh 3 ounces each. I had a few that were slightly light so I ended up with 19 cookies instead of the 18 that the recipe promised and the last one was on the light side!

The instructions said to flatten each mound to about two inches. I have another cookie recipe that says to grease and sugar the bottom of a glass to accomplish this so since the recipe didn't say how to flatten them, I employed this method. I used the paper from the unsalted butter to grease the bottom of the glass and then dipped it into powdered sugar. They looked like the photo below going into the oven.

The photo above is how they looked coming out after 18 minutes in a convection oven. I cooled them for five minutes in the pan and then moved them to a cooling rack and covered them with powdered sugar.

They are so delicious that I took a bite before I took the photo!

     
I gave most of them to my friend Julia who has boys at her house when I ate lunch with her today. I hope they enjoy them....so much better than the ones in the bag at the grocery!

Baking Chez Moi Plain and Simple Almond Cake

When I read about this cake, my immediate response was, "Well, that will never work for me."

There are only three ingredients: eggs, sugar and almond flour. The first challenge was finding almond flour, which was, of course, available at Whole Foods. But with just three ingredients and the instructions to use a gentle hand, I approached this cake with fear and trembling.

You'll find the recipe in Baking Chez Moi.

I followed all the instructions:

Whisked the egg yolks with the sugar.

Prepared the pan. I must not have done it well because at the end, it was difficult to get out of the pan.

Got the whites ready to whisk.

Stopped when they made soft peaks.

She says to stir in a little of the whites. Then you fold in the remaining whites and about half the almond flour. Finally, you fold in the rest of the almond flour. In order to have a gentle hand in your folding, there are only two additions. You can see unincorporated almond flour in the photo below. I tried and succeeded at getting it all folded in, but next time, still being very gentle, I might try adding the almond flour in three additions. I think it might be easier on the egg whites, but at the same time, the third folding might break them down more. I will only know when I try it.

I baked it in a springform pan and, although that was suggested, it didn't come out of the pan well. I was glad for the height because the cake used the pan height. Here it has cooled for about five minutes and isn't as high as it was right out of the oven. It acted a little like an angel food cake.

She says to cool for five minutes in the pan and then turn it out to cool on the rack. When I turned it out, the upper left stuck to the corner of the pan (between the sides and the bottom) and tore the cake slightly. I did finally get it out, happy to say.

I can't keep all of these desserts around the house, so I cut the cake in half and sent half of it home to my daughter and her family. My son-in-law left me this message: "This almond cake is AMAZING. We are coming to get the other half! See you in a few minutes..."

I agree with him. It is about half the height it had in the pan, but it is incredibly moist, tastes lovely of almonds with no almond extract (which I sometimes think is overpowering) and I will definitely make it again.

If anyone has tried this and has any suggestions about getting it out of the pan, please let me know. Of course, I may simply need to grease and flour the pan better. But I wondered if it needed to cool in the pan longer than five minutes before turning it out.

I forgot to take a photo of the cut cake until it was almost all gone!