I said real Danishes were good, I didn’t say they were cheap. Good Euro butter, if you can locate the truly outstanding stuff, can run you in excess of ten dollars a pound. Is it worth it? Absolutely, for just like any pastry made from a layered (or “laminated”) dough, butter is where the lion’s […]
READ ONWe had one heck of a wind storm yesterday that took out power to most of Louisville and knocked over a huge number of our famous old-growth trees. Given how many houses are under those trees, there seems to be a fair amount of damage…though obviously nothing compared to what all those poor folks to […]
READ ON…famous pastry chefs and restauranteurs push it to these ridiculous extremes.
READ ONLike classic sweet rolls, these too are fixtures of the Danish counter. The reason (probably), because the shape is so darn versatile. There are chocolate chip snails (like mine above), cinnamon sugar snails, cinnamon sugar and raisin snails, walnut and cinnamon sugar snails, pecan snails, almond filling snails and any-kind-of- jam-you-can-possibly-think-of snails. And none are […]
READ ONWould you be surprised if I told you that the Danish isn’t actually Danish? Of course you wouldn’t, because by now you well know that layered pastries weren’t invented by Europeans, but by the Arabs and/or Turks, and only arrived in Europe in the high middle ages. Just how they got there is anyone’s guess, […]
READ ONThe Battle of Vienna, the most baking-intensive conflict in the history of man, ended after a combined army led by King John III Sobieski of Poland defeated the Ottoman Turks. How apropos!
READ ONI’ll warn you now, as if you couldn’t have already guessed, I make rich Danishes. I can’t help it, it’s how I learned. Not only did the bakers that taught me employ that classic, buttery layered dough, they managed to work an additional layer of vanilla buttercream into almost every Danish we made (and that’s […]
READ ONHere’s a nice Danish-style pastry dough that works as well for coffee cakes as it does for Danishes. And mark my words, this tastes as close to the real thing as we can get in the States. A mighty viking woman I once had the honor of knowing (until, sadly, she died two years ago) […]
READ ONThere are a few of you out there who’ve been waiting a long time for me to get back around to this topic. Finally, I’ve carved out a little time to actually do it properly: Danishes.
READ ONA rather odd little detour for a pastry blog, don’t you think? Yet I think it’s a helpful distinction to remember these days, when overheated rhetoric about agricultural practices and land use are driving everybody ’round the bend. Personally, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone, anywhere in the world these days who […]
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