All posts by Francois Nguyen

Sweet pastry dough

This the the pie dough I use for my fruit pies.

Ingredients:

  • 2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
  • 2/3 cup unsalted butter
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • dash of salt

Pour the four and salt in a mixing bowl. Add in the sugar. do not mix.
Cut up the butter in small pieces and put on top of the sugar.
With your fingers or whole hands mix the sugar and butter. Then mix with the rest until it’s crumbly. Add the eggs and mix, knead a bit until it does not stick to your hands. Add a pinch of flour if it sticks a bit.
Split in two parts, Wrap in cling film or put in tupperware and let it rest in the fridge for a couple of hours.

Take it out of the fridge and microwave for 10-20 seconds. Roll to a couple of mm thick. You can transfer it to a pie pan. The dough can easily be patched if it does not come perfect the first time. Nobody will notice.

Fill the pie with desired filling and bake usually about 40 minutes at 325.

 

Financiers cookies recipe

The history of financiers is full of poetry and uncertainty. Some claim that the name comes from the mold in the shape of a small gold bar, other that it was originally eaten by traders at the Paris stock exchange as a finger food.
Note that financiers are cake, not pastry.

It is thus best made in a financier mold, but you can do it in Madeleine pans too; they will disappear just as fast.

Ingredients

  • 50 g. almond powder or almond meal (about 1/2 cup)
  • 50 g. all purpose flour (between 1/3 and 1/2 a cup)
  • 150 g granulated sugar ( 3/4 cup)
  • 75 g butter (about 6.5 tbsp)
  • 4 egg whites
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • a dash of salt.

 

preheat oven to 325

In another mixing bowl, put the dry ingredients (but the salt) and the vanilla.

Melt the butter in the microwave. 45 seconds should it. The official recipe calls for beurre noisette but with so much almond, i am not sure it will make any difference. if you insist on doing it right, put the butter in a saucepan and cook it on low to medium heat until about 1/4 of it evaporates. The milk solids will separate from the butter milk and sink to the bottom and start browning.

In a mixing bowl, beat the egg white and dash of salt to fairly hard peak.

Add the whipped egg whites to the dry ingredients and combine carefully.

Add the butter and combine.

Spoon into the molds.

bake for about 15 minutes and unmold. Let them cool upside down so they can dry out a bit.

 

 

 

Yogurt Cake

This is the cake i did when i was a kid. Super simple and super delicious.
The beauty of it is you don’t need any measuring tool but a yogurt pot!

Ingredients

  • 1 yogurt
  • 1 yogurt of oil
  • 2 yogurts of sugar
  • 3 yogurts of flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder

 

Preheat the over to 350F
In a mixing bowl, put a yogurt.
Use the yogurt pot to measure 1 yogurt pot of oil, 2 pot of sugar, 3 pot of flour, 3 eggs.
Add the baking powder and mix it all together.
In your baking pan (any will do: round, square, Darth Vader shaped,…) put a coat of fat (oil or butter) then a light coat of flour, so the cake will not stick.
Put the batter in the pan and cook for 30 minutes. It’s cooked when you can push a knife in the cake and it comes out clean.
Wait a little bit before taking the cake off the mold.

You can flavor to cake with vanilla extract, lemon zest, etc.

You can color the cake with liquid food coloring.

I also like to put some canned pineapple rings in the pan before pouring the batter. Present upside down.