Norwegian Coffee Cake: A Yeast-Averse Story

If you've read some of my posts before, you've noticed that I don't make a lot of bread, and that on the rare occasions when I do, I mention my aversion to yeast. Well, maybe it's time I admitted that this aversion I have to yeast is mostly due to my often having a packet of yeast in the cupboard that, logically, hardly ever gets used resulting in the yeast becoming so old and ineffective that, when I finally get around to using it, a fair amount of cursing and imprecations is directed at said yeast when my dough still hasn't risen after 3 hours of pilot-lighting, oven-front sitting, steam bathing, etc...

So imagine my utter delight when, having purchased a brand new shiny packet of yeast a couple of months ago, all my bread endeavors now promptly ferment, bubble and rise and I obtain the bread I was trying to make, my kneading inability notwithstanding.
Really, there are two culprits in this newfound desire I have to actually make bread and brave yeast: their names are Jamie and Deeba. I mentioned both of them in the last post.

What you may not know about them is that Jamie has this fabulous recipe for a chocolate meringue coffee cake on her blog which was the catalyst of my old yeast/new yeast debacle, and Deeba pulls baked goods out of her oven like Mary Poppins pulls whatever she might need out of her bag. So when Jamie declared that she was hosting this month's Bread Baking Day and that the theme of it would be her birthday which was the 28th of January, I felt I really should participate both because she is a dear friend and because she got me to start baking bread. Deeba's contribution was to insist on posting bread after bread after bread, some from the Ottolenghi book which I gave her when she was here for FBC, which heightened my desperation for bread-baking success. 

So out came the Tassajara Bread Book which I purchased last summer with every intention of making a ton of bread, and which went unused until yesterday when I leafed through it looking purposely for a yeasted recipe (yes there is a whole un-yeasted bread section in there) and came upon this Norwegian coffee cake. Flavored with cardamom, which I love, at its simplest, it seemed just the thing to bake on a chilly Sunday.
I had a bar of Valrhona orange chocolate I needed to use and orange and chocolate being two flavors that marry well with cardamom, half of it went into the bread. I could choose any shape and having never baked challah or any other braided bread before, I decided to try a four-stranded braid. Though I knew I'd gone wrong about halfway through the loaf (past the point where the diagrams ended), it wasn't until after I'd put the bread in the oven that I suddenly understood how the weave worked.

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Back to Regularly Scheduled Programming with A Gâteau à l'Orange

It's been a bit of a whirlwind around here these last few days. I feel like I'm doing eight things at once all online. It's a good feeling even though I don't think I have enough of a sleep reserve for it; this manifests itself in the fact that usually the more things I have to do, the more efficient I become, and right now I'm not being as efficient as I could be.
I want to thank everyone who's contributed to the Haiti Relief Effort so far both on this blog and through the Twitter campaign. Every comment helps more than you can imagine so thank you to everyone who left at least one comment here to help us out. So far, nearly $14K have been raised here and almost $5K on Twitter so I'm very pleased. Remember that every comment you leave until January 31st counts toward the total.

And for those of you who have been patient enough to wait for me to get back to the more regular pursuits of this blog, here's a cake for you. This cake has been blogged about elsewhere already as a result of my disseminating the recipe I'd found, but if you've seen this cake on another blog, probably Deeba's, you can see that my version of it is Cinderella at her stepmother's house, and her version is Cinderella at the ball. Either way, it's delicious and if you love citrus a fraction as much as I do, you should definitely try it.

It's winter and with winter comes revelry (and its remains), snow (sometimes), and above all citrus.
Let me be perfectly clear about this: I'm ethnically Iranian folks, and if any of you know any Persian people, you know we love our citrus. As I said to Deeba and she quoted me back on her blog: We're a bit obsessive and weird about our citrus fruit. We hoard it, display it, eat it, drink it, preserve it, dry it, cook it, and I'm sure we'd bake it too if there were a tradition like that of Western baking in Iran, heck we'd probably wear oranges and lemons if we could find a way to. When my father was a three year-old boy in Tehran, he would sneak into the pantry to drink the freshly squeezed and bottled lemon juice. Did you catch the part about his being three years old?

Nowadays, he will eat a whole 2Kg (4lb) bag of oranges at one sitting while reading the newspaper or working at his computer. And while my obsession at the age of seven lay with sipping red wine vinegar I'd have snuck in a cup back to my bedroom rather than lemon juice, I think you get the point that my family and tart and acidic foods, citrus being a prime group of these, are a tight-knit bunch. So the first time I had an orange cake that really tasted like it had orange in it, albeit not that much, but more than an orange pound cake, I became obsessed with finding a truly orange-tasting recipe.

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Chocolate-Orange Creams - Pots de Creme Chocolat-Orange

These little guys were born of three things: One is a bunch of leftover egg yolks after making some buttercream frosting for a Daring Baker cake, another is from seeing this recipe on the good baking fairy Tartelette's website, and the third is a forlorn tablet of Valrhona orange chocolate that I had forgotten about in one of the cupboards.

FR: Ces pots de crèmes sont nés de trois circonstances: D'abord, plein de jaunes d'oeufs qui me restaient après avoir fait de la crème au beurre pour un défi des Daring Bakers, ensuite cette recette sur le site de la bonne fée pâtissière Tartelette, et finalement une tablette de chocolat-orange Valrhona qui se morfondait dans un de mes placards.

Custard-style creams are one of my favorite things because they make me think of home, and France is home even though many other places have been and are home as well. My most favorite thing is a good strawberry tartlet the way it's made in France, a sable crust with a layer of almondine cream, a layer of custard cream, strawberries and glaze. I don't care much for other styles of fruit pies, give me custard on a fruit pie or give me nothing is what I say.

FR: Les crèmes du genre patissiêre sont une de mes choses préférées parce qu'elle me font penser à chez moi, et la France c'est chez moi même si plusieurs autres endroits ont été et sont chez moi aussi. Mon truc préféré c'est une bonne tartelette aux fraises comme on les fait en France, avec une pâte sablée, une couche de crème amandine, une couche de crème pâtissière, des fraises et de la gelée ou de l'abricotage adapté. Je n'aime pas tellement les autres genres de tartes aux fruits (telles celles des Américains), donnez-moi de la crème d'un genre ou d'un autre sur ma tarte aux fruits ou rien du tout, voilà ce que j'en dis.

Anyway, these are the easiest thing in the world to make and Tartelette's recipe is quick and light in the end, even if one has a broken oven, which was the case back when I made these. (For interested parties, what was wrong with the oven that eventually imploded was that the knobs had somehow been installed to turn the wrong way, which meant that even though we could turn the oven on, when we'd set a temperature, the wiring wouldn't actually control the temperature at all. Sometimes, when I think about it now, I am amazed that we got anything to cook properly in there - by we I mean A. making roasts and me making cakes and things like these little creams). If you like chocolate, they are definitely, as Tartelette points out in her post, the quickest and best homemade comfort dessert around.

FR: Enfin, c'est la chose la plus facile du monde à faire et la recette de Tartelette est simple et légère, même si on utilise un four cassé, comme c'était le cas pour moi quand j'ai fait ces petits pots. (Pour les intéressés, le four qui a finalement implosé était cassé de la manière suivante, les manettes avaient été installées pour tourner dans la mauvaise direction - comment cela est-il arrivé, mystère - ce qui signifiait que nous pouvions allumer le four mais que les contacts ne controlaient pas la température choisie du tout. Des fois quand j'y pense je me demande comment nous avons fait pour faire cuire n'importe quoi correctement dedans - par nous je veux dire A. faisant rôtir des choses et moi faisant des gâteaux et autres choses comme ces petites crèmes). En tout cas, si vous aimez le chocolat, comme Tartelette le dit dans son billet, ces petits pots sont les meilleurs desserts rapides et réconfortants de possible fait maison.