Orange Tian

Jennifer from Chocolate Shavings is our host for the March 2010 Daring Bakers' challenge. She presented us with an orange tian which she made for the first time a few months ago at the Alain Ducasse Cooking School in Paris, France. An orange tian is a layered dessert: a base of pate sablee, orange marmalade, whipped cream topped with fresh orange segments and served with a caramel and orange sauce.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not have time to make my own orange marmalade so I cannot comment on the marmalade making part of this month's challenge. Instead I used one of my favorite local brands, Frog Hollow Farm navel orange marmalade. I also skipped the caramel. I didn’t even make the pate sablee using the recipe Jennifer provided since I already had some in the freezer leftover from some previous baking endeavor.

But I do have an excuse. My March was very busy. At the office my team was at the end of our launch cycle which is typically the busiest and craziest time. To make a busy time even busier I was in Quebec for a week just days before the launch. (My vacation was planned way before the launch schedule was finalized.) I also celebrated my birthday with a lengthy (5 hour!) but wonderful dinner at Manresa in Los Gatos. We had some relatives visiting from out of town and spent a couple nights hanging out with them. And then we had two baby parties (one red egg and ginger and one birthday) to attend. This left me with hardly enough time to devote to this month's DB challenge.

I did manage to whip together a quick version of the tian. I made two 3-inch tians: one using Cuties brand mandarin oranges (see first photo above) and the other with navel oranges (see photo below). Supreming oranges is something I do often since I like the way membrane-free segments look in salads (and I prepare a lot of salads with citrus fruits). All you need is a sharp knife. I only used half the amount of gelatin in my whipped cream layer since I knew that my heavy cream had a high enough fat content to hold its shape after unmolding and I don't like that slightly rubbery texture that cream takes on when gelatin is added.

I didn't freeze my assembled tians. I just let them chill in the refrigerator until it was time to serve them. Unmolding was easy and the orange segments looked really pretty. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the taste of the final product. It tasted like whipped cream with orange segments and a sugar cookie, which is really what it was, but I guess I was hoping that the sum would be greater than all its parts. Maybe the caramel would've made a difference? Even though I was disappointed with my results, I'm glad I was able to complete this challenge.


navel orange tian

The fine print:
The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse's Cooking School in Paris.

Compost Cookie Bars

I didn't visit the much talked about Momofuku Milk Bar the last time I was in New York City. I did eat at Momofuku Noodle Bar where I indulged in a bowl of their famous ramen and those amazing pork belly buns, but never made it to Milk Bar. Milk Bar is best known for their crack pie and their compost cookies. The compost cookie recipe has been floating around the internet ever since Christina Tosi, Milk Bar's pastry chef, appeared on Live with Regis and Kelly.

In the past the cookie probably would've been called a kitchen sink cookie (as in a cookie with everything but the kitchen sink thrown into it), but in this very environmentally conscious day and age, compost cookie sounds much more trendy. I think what really makes it a compost cookie is the addition of used coffee grounds. Yup, used grounds. I've read that others who have tried the compost cookie recipe thought the coffee grounds didn't really add much to the cookie, but I whole-heartedly disagree. Even though my grounds were used (and therefore much of the "coffee-ness" was already extracted) I could still taste the coffee in my cookie. Maybe it depends on the freshness and type of coffee beans used and how long the used grounds have been sitting after extraction? My used grounds were from locally roasted Blue Bottle beans ground right before making my pour over coffee and the used grounds had only been sitting around for a couple hours. I loved the flecks of coffee throughout the cookie. Of course you don't have to use used coffee grounds. Adding some unused ground coffee would work too (but it would be less compost-y).



The recipe calls for refrigerating the cookie dough for at least one hour before baking to prevent the cookies from spreading too much. I was crunched for time so I skipped the chilling and just spread the just made dough into a baking pan to make cookie bars. After spreading the dough in the pan I gave it a nice sprinkling of Maldon sea salt to play up the salty sweet nature of my cookie bar.

You can use any combination of add-ins and snack foods like chocolate chunks, butterscotch, nuts, dried fruits, candies (like chopped up peanut butter cups, Snickers, Rollos), breakfast cereal, salted pretzels, salted potato chips, oatmeal. I went with 60% cacao chocolate chips, Rice Krispies cereal, crushed salted pretzels and sliced almonds. Use whatever you like - sky's the limit!