I made my first brioche today! I took the recipe from Le Larousse des Desserts. I’ve been wanting to do it for a while, but had trouble finding baker’s yeast until now. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Happy baking!

It’s been a while since I baked and blogged about cupcakes. I thought it was high time to fix that! Some friends gave me the Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes book a while ago and I haven’t done a recipe from it yet. I found one that was a flavour combo I hadn’t done before: chocolate and lavender. It was also a way of doing icing I hadn’t done before so I was eager to try it out. Since I didn’t have any food colouring handy I left the icing white. They turned out quite tasty. I’ve always had to use a lot of lavender to get the taste to come out, but this recipe only called for 1/2 a teaspoon and you can really taste it in the icing.

Enjoy

I haven’t been blogging much lately and for that I am sorry, but to make up for it I bring you fudge and “sucre à la crème”. For those who don’t know, “sucre à la crème” is like fudge without chocolate, very popular in Quebec. Fudge and “sucre à la crème” are really Christmassy to me. I guess it goes back to one of my moms patient bringing her a box of homemade fudge and “sucre à la crème” every Christmas. I’ve never done either of them and though it was high time to try it! I found a great recipe for fudge on http://oldtymefudgerecipes.com/ and managed to get it pretty good the first time around.

I had a slightly more vague recipe for the “sucre à la crème” unfortunately. I used this recipe: http://www.recettes.qc.ca/recettes/recette.php?id=397. The first time I tried it, it never took, it stayed in a very gooey state. I wasn’t paying attention to temperatures since it was not indicated in the recipe. I tried it again the next day, this time paying close attention to hitting the same temperatures as the fudge, after all the final product has the same texture. I thought it was worth a try. So I did it. I was almost done and as I was whisking away I thought I had ended up with caramel. I set it aside and went to check my recipes again. I had done everything right so I went back to my pot and whisk except when I went to pick up the whisk the “sucre à la crème” had already hardened! I took out a chunk of it by lifting my whisk! Well the good news is I managed to make a successful “sucre à la crème”, the slightly disappointing news there’s not a lot of pretty squares.

I hope you guys learn from my mistakes and give these a try, they are so worth it!