We’ll skip the whole I’m-sorry-I-haven’t-been-posting-please-forgive-me thing and just jump right to the good stuff.

In part one of two, I’m basically getting reacquainted with all of you still patient enough to read, as sporadic as it happens. I’m also giving a tutorial on how to make your own puff pastry and how to make your own croissants.

Onto the reacquainting.

My name’s Brett. Remember me?

Recently I left my job at Disney to start food styling for TV. That’s a whole post in and of itself, but know that because I’m finally doing what I love, I have the time to actually, feasibly, dedicate resources to The Crumberry Bake Shop, poor neglected thing.

This past weekend was one of the first in recent memory where I didn’t have to work all of it, so that left me time to make brunch, which, any New Yorker will tell you, is the only reason weekends exist.

We wanted something light, something with loads of flavor, but something that would also fill us up. 

I suggested something with quinoa, but if you know me at all, when I like something, I like it to the point where I make everyone else sick of it, so Chuck suggested Chicken Salad, and it went downhill from there. Good call.

Instead of making sandwiches that could’ve felt heavy, we made fresh, miniature croissants that were light and buttery (and gave us a reason to not feel badly about eating two….or four…each).

You’re used to seeing desserts and sugary recipes from me, but croissants will forever hold a special place in my heart, especially when they turned out this well.

Want to make your own croissants at home? Check out this post from the Crumberry Archive on how to make them from scratch.

(And if you’re in a hurry or just don’t feel like making the puff pastry, there’s no shame in using a really good quality store-bought puff pastry.)

If you’re up to the challenge (and want the bragging rights to your friends that you make your own puff pastry [brush off your shoulder, champ]) grab the recipe for the perfect croissant after the jump.

Also, a huge thank you to Chuck Willis. He’s the reason you’re drooling over the photo right now. ;)

Check back later this week—I’m breaking my dessert-baking rule and in The Perfect Sunday Brunch: Part 2, I’ll share the chicken salad recipe with you. Your brunch guests will be begging you for more.

Onto the recipe…

Blogging has proven to be something I find less and less time for; disheartening, considering this is the reason I decided to be a pastry chef… Good thing is, I finally found time to make something and blog about it this week. This might be the best cookie I’ve ever eaten. That’s saying something. And I don’t mean that to pat myself on the back since I wrote the recipe or anything…. ;)

This past week some friends of mine took me to Michael Voltaggio’s ink.sack extension of his restaurant, ink in LA. The concept is simple: gourmet sandwiches and really well-done simple desserts that are packed with flavor.

Needless to say, the cold fried chicken sandwich that found itself in my stomach was exactly what I needed that day. And the Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookie wasn’t too bad either. Nice toasty cinnamon, pockets of dark chocolate, a hint of salt. It was pretty good. Saying I’d pay $2 for another one is an understatement.

But, like with all desserts I eat when I go out, I immediately thought, “can I make this?” “I can make this.” “I can so totally make this.” and I did. I went home, I wrote a recipe based on the first recipe I ever wrote for a cookie, and went from there, and surprisingly, they turned out amazingly. It just so happened that I had a dinner party to go to where I cooked two roasted chickens and root vegetables with an arugula salad, with fresh burrata and heirloom tomatoes and balsamic reduction where I could serve these cookies with espresso as dessert. 

Win/win.

These cookies were warm, crispy on the edges, chewy in the middle, with the perfect balance of cakey and crunchy. The Saigon cinnamon I used gave a really great smoky and toasted heat to the cookie, while the dark chocolate instantly gave this deep, earthy and slightly fruity flavor to round out the bite.

I decided to go a little heavier on the salt with my version of this cookie, because 1. I like things really salty, and 2. I like for the contrast in flavors to be a little more intense and up-front than the cookie I had at ink sack. Nothing against theirs by any means, I just wanted to make my own version of this cookie instead of copying theirs.

Serve this cookie warm or with ice cream sandwiched between two for a gourmet treat that’ll blow any dinner guest’s socks off.

Salted Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies
A Crumberry Bake Shop Original
Yield: About 15 2” cookies

Ingredients:

• 2 cups All-Purpose flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 4-5 Tb good cinnamon (you can adjust how much or how little cinnamon, depending on how cinnamon-y you want the cookies to be)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 bag of really good quality semi-sweet chocolate chunks
• 1 1/2 sticks butter, softened
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 tsp Mexican Vanilla (or whatever vanilla extract you have)
• Coarse grain sea salt for finishing

Process:

1. Preheat the oven to 375˚F
2. Mix all dry ingredients in a medium-sized bowl and set aside.
3. In a bowl or stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, add eggs and vanilla and mix to combine.
4. Slowly add dry mix and mix until just combined. Don’t over mix the cookie dough here or you’ll have really tough cookies.
5. With a wooden spoon, fold the chocolate chunks into the cookie dough until they’re evenly incorporated throughout.
6. Using two tablespoons, spoon the cookies two inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets and bake 9-11 minutes, or until the edges start to brown. 
7. As soon as you remove the cookies from the oven, finish the tops with coarse sea salt, and allow them to cool completely before serving them, that way the salt sticks to the cookie and you get a nice salty, cinnamony, chocolately bite each time.

Michael Voltaggio, let me be first in line to say I love ink.sack

And special thanks to Chuck D. Willis for shooting this after I’d styled it. The dinner party was a huge success :) (Also, thanks for featuring these cookies on your lifestyle blog)

This time last year I was one day away from moving to New York City to start my life as a culinary student at the French Culinary Institute in Soho. Today I’m writing from sunny Southern California where, I’m so frickin excited to announce that I’m one of Disney’s newest pastry chefs, and my first day is this coming Saturday (wish me luck!!)

This time last year one of my best friends, Marina, was celebrating getting her US Citizenship (happy anniversary, Marina) and I was getting ready to uproot and move a thousand miles from my home in South Carolina. Marina, who moved to the US with her mom around 2001 from Russia, had been wanting to make it official for some time, and finally it worked out for everything to be completed to secure her citizenship. The US is definitely lucky we got this girl. So, Happy Citizenship anniversary, Marina! :)

When I think about the 4th of July I can’t help but think of the family cookouts, parties and fireworks displays that I’ve known my whole life. If we weren’t spending way too much money on fireworks, something was wrong. This year I miss not being with my family in the South, but I’m loving being with my family in SoCal. Life is good y’all.

When I tried to think of something I could do for our get-together this year, I was almost at a loss. There wasn’t much room left in my head to think about things aside from moving and tackling the mountain of laundry I need to pack. Then Martha saved the day.

These cookies were featured in Martha Stewart Living for their 4th of July issue, and let’s be honest: who doesn’t like cookies and who doesn’t like fireworks?

If you’re thinking “I don’t like cookies or fireworks”, you’re lying.

These were probably the easiest cookies I’ve ever made (which is good if you’re planning on making them and taking them to your 4th of July celebration this year). You should know, though, that you should allow yourself a good 8 hours before you want to serve them to make sure the royal icing sets up well enough. I’m big on texture, and to me there’s nothing worse than biting into half set-up, half soft royal icing.

[Grab the recipe for these cookies after the jump]

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If you’ve been reading my tweets or my Facebook posts, I said last time that I had some pretty big news to share. Last week I packed up my things in Brooklyn and took the Crumberry Bake Shop to sunny Southern California! New York is great, I’ll always love the city, but this is the newest chapter in mine and my blog’s lives, so I’m looking forward to whatever this new adventure holds for me.

One night my roommate, Steven and I went to a new macaron shop in Newport Beach. Macarons are pretty to look at, but I think since I was so late to the game with this one, I’m not a superfan like some of you might be (after all, I only had my first macaron ever around October of last year). Needless to say, mine were pretty good.

I got a passion fruit macaron (my favorite of the two) and an espresso (really sweet, but still pretty good).

These were the perfect size, just right for petit fours or something, so that after I’d eaten them both, I didn’t feel like I needed to go run a marathon to work it off. The coffee I was on the fence about, but the passion fruit was probably my favorite macaron I’ve had to date. So keep it up, ‘lette, you might change my mind on macarons yet.

Suffice it so say, California rocks.

I have some pretty cool things coming up in the next few weeks that I can’t talk about just yet (but I will be sharing after the fact) and! My blog is turning 2 years old in a couple days. I can’t even believe the time has gone by so quickly. What was once only read by my family (hi mom) is now in over a hundred countries and growing. Daily. Even though I don’t always have my act together to be able to post some weeks.

You guys reading are the reason I write about food. It’s the reason I want to share what I’m doing with others because every time I get a comment, an email, a tweet, just saying that you appreciate what I’m doing, it makes it that much more worthwhile.

So stay tuned. Big things are coming for the Crumberry Bake Shop, and I’m glad you’re all along for the ride.

I received a question (and I’m not sure how long ago it was submitted, so I’m sorry if you needed this answer ASAP..) about how to make bonbons and how to use bonbon shells.

The reader, who submitted their question anonymously, asked:

just drooling over your Mascarpone/ Bacon Bonbons. I was just wondering how I’m supposed to put the filling into a nice chocolate bonbon-shape, you mentioned bonbon-shells, but I’m not sure how to produce such a shell… thanks for answering my question!

The cool thing about bonbon making is you can leave all the work to the bonbon molds. You can buy molds from several different online retailers for as low as $1 per mold, (I did a quick Google search and these are all the results it returned to me), and most of them are really decorative, so as long as you’ve tempered your chocolate properly, the bonbons won’t stick to the plastic molds, and you’ll be able to make your own custom, decorative chocolates in no time.

Here’s a really cool video tutorial featuring my old boss, Mr. Chocolate himself, Jacques Torres that might be more helpful than me trying to give you step-by-step written instructions:

I hope this answered your question! If you ever have any more questions to submit, feel free to click the link at the top of the page, or send an email to hello@crumberrybakeshop.com. You can also reach me on the Crumberry Facebook page, or on the @CrumberryBakes twitter account.

I just might be am the worst food blogger to ever exist.

I’d go through the whole, “I’m-sorry-forgive-me-it’s-been-too-long-since-I’ve-posted” bit but we both know that got old like…2 years ago.

In the past couple weeks since I’ve been on this little blogging hiatus, I’ve been working my tail off. As we speak I’m FaceTiming with my mom and two sisters (hi, guys!) [I’ve been having to learn how to multitask like a boss] and I’m working on a project because tomorrow I’m speaking to a group of middleschoolers in Harlem about what it means to be a pastry chef… SO I’m nervous on the one hand and excited on the other. I hope I don’t scare away the future dessert-makers of the world, though. I’ll be sure to report back.

In the meantime, I’ve been on an ice cream kick lately. It’s so easy to make that I don’t know why I never got into making it more often. You might be thinking, “I can’t make ice cream, I don’t have an ice cream machine!”

Yes you can.

This isn’t an ice cream infomercial…

If you have a metal bowl (or even better, a stand mixer) you can make really great ice cream that’ll be the perfect addition to any summer dessert you’ll be making this year.

For this recipe to work and not make the ice cream a brown-color-bleeding mess, find those old school sprinkles that aren’t candy coated, they’re the ones that when you press them between your fingers, they turn to powder. Those work best for this kind of ice cream because they’re not coated with food coloring and they won’t bleed.

To make this ice cream all you really have to know is how to temper eggs, and by that, I mean boiling milk and cream and steadily (but not too quickly), and with a steady whisking motion, mixing the milk/cream into egg yolks to cook the eggs without curdling them. For a good video demo, watch this demo, courtesy of Kenmore:

For the Ice Cream Base

Ingredients

• 1 qt Heavy Cream
• 1 qt Whole Milk
• 22 oz (by weight) (use your kitchen scale for this one) egg yolks
• 1 lb sugar, split
• 3-4 vanilla beans
• Sprinkles

Process

1. In a sauce pot, combine the cream, milk, 1/2 lb of sugar and the scraped vanilla beans. Bring to a full boil
2. Just as the milk/cream boils, whisk the egg yolks with the remaining 1/2 lb of sugar until it’s lightened in color.
3. As the cream boils, temper the eggs as shown in the demo video and return the mixture to the pot and cook (while whisking constantly) until the mixture can coat the back of a wooden spoon.
4. Once it’s at this point, remove from the heat, strain into a separate bowl and cover the surface directly with a piece of plastic wrap to prevent it from forming a skin. Nobody wants that.
5. Once it’s chilled (you can use an ice bath or just let it come to room temperature, then chill in the fridge for a couple hours), add as many sprinkles as you’d like (just don’t add too many… you do want some ice cream with your sprinkles…) place the ice cream base in the metal bowl of your stand mixer and place in the freezer.
6. Depending on your freezer and how cold it is the time will vary, so watch the bowl: as the edge of the mixture begins to freeze, remove from the freezer and whip with the whisk attachment to redistribute the frozen cream into the still-liquid base.
7. Repeat this step (it might take a while) until the ice cream is nice and frozen and whipped to perfection. It’ll be worth the wait. Trust me.

Stay tuned! I’ll be reporting back on the career fair as well as announcing some exciting news later this week!

Everybody loves the flavor combination of peanut butter and jelly. Well, unless you’re allergic to peanuts… in that case I feel really freaking sad for you. Really. I can’t imagine not being able to know the joy that a Reese’s cup brings… or a Fast Break… or just peanut butter straight from the jar. That would be like the ultimate dessert punishment for me, taking away peanut butter.

My appreciation for peanut butter & jelly goes way, way back. Nearly every day of my public school years I took a PB & J sandwich (….or lunchables pizza…) to school.

Growing up in the public school system didn’t exactly give me the best exposure to food the first 18 years of my life. Let’s be honest. Pizzas are not rectangular. Pepperoni are not cubes. Cheese, when baked, should melt. Potatoes are not flakes. …you get my drift?

So my mom packed PB & J’s for me to take to school. Then after a while I had her just make peanut butter sandwiches…. that irrelevant.

Long story short, when I ran across this recipe for Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars, I knew I’d probably be eating myself sick. Warm, peanut butter crust, sweet strawberry jelly, salty roasted peanuts and a peanut butter crumble on top….. There was no way I wouldn’t like this bar.

Also, I had never had the combination of peanut butter and strawberry jelly before. I’ve always eaten PB & J’s with grape jelly, buuuuut I have to say that I might be a convert. Normally I’m a purist with childhood favorites but this is one time that I’ll go on record and say the exception is worth it.

The recipe, courtesy of Martha Stewart, is one that could easily be adjusted to fit whatever kind of peanut-buttery bar you wanted to make… I’m thinking it might be good to substitute jelly at some point with caramel and drizzle the baked bars with chocolate for a dressed-up take on a Snickers bar… or maybe caramelize some bananas and make a Peanut Butter bar fit for a King. I’m drooling. My mac is already falling apart… this isn’t helping.

Shut up and post the recipe! Ok. Here.

Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars
from Martha Stewart’s Holiday Cookies 2001, Special Issue 2001 

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature, plus more for pan
• 3 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for pan
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 1/2 cups smooth peanut butter
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 cups strawberry jam, or other flavor
• 2/3 cup salted peanuts, roughly chopped

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 350˚F. With Pam cooking spray, grease the sides of a 9 x 13 inch baking dish and line the bottom with parchment. Make sure not to spray the parchment, because you don’t want the crust getting soggy from the cooking spray.
• In a stand mixer with paddle attachment, cream butter and sugar on medium-high for about 2 minutes, or until the butter becomes light and fluffy.
• Reduce your mixer speed to medium and add eggs (one at a time!) and peanut butter. Beat until it’s only just come together.
• In a medium sized bowl, combine salt, baking powder, and flour. Add dry mix to the mixer bowl and mix on low, just to combine. Stream in vanilla and mix until fully incorporated.
• Transfer 2/3 of the peanut butter mixture to the 9 x 13 pan and spread evenly with an offset spatula (…or your hands).
• Using a spatula or an offset spatula, spread the strawberry jam evenly over the peanut butter base.
• Crumble (Martha says dollop) the remaining peanut butter mixture over the top of the strawberry jam and sprinkle with honey-roasted peanuts.
• Bake until golden, about 45 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool; cut into about thirty-six 1 1/2-by-2-inch pieces.

And then you eat yourself into sweet oblivion, fueled by all those childhood memories when you were so thankful that Mom packed the sandwich that singlehandedly saved you from the grey, lifeless, speckled mystery meat that the lunch room was serving up for three weeks in a row.

I haven’t caught the zombie fever yet (terrible pun, it’s not even worth pretending to laugh at). A lot of my friends update their Facebook statuses and tweet during new episodes of The Walking Dead and part of me wonders what all the fuss is about. I guess if I had time to actually sit down and watch TV I might give it a shot (through the head) (is that how you kill a zombie?) (I have to stop this…)

So for you undead-lovin’ fans, just in time for Easter, fill your Easter baskets with this.

This chocolate zombie bunny  from the geniuses at Think Geek is 8 ounces of green-tinted, premium quality white chocolate. It’s pretty enough to reflect your fancy-dressed outside and twisted enough to reflect your gore-loving inside. And for $15, how could you deny someone the zombie bunny of a lifetime?

The only thing worse than a zombie, though, is a zombie bunny…. can you imagine how their army would grow?! It’d be like a wildfire! There’d be no saving humanity.

Should you find yourself under attack from these bunnies this Easter, a good swift bite to the head should get the situation under control.

Stay safe and bake on.

Growing up I hardly ever ate breakfast. Something about eating before 10am never really set well with me, so I avoided it all together (I know, I know, it’s the most important meal of the day, whatever).

But lately, breakfast and breakfast food is all I want to eat. Y’all know I love bacon, so that’s a given, but cereal, oatmeal, yogurt, granola…. I’m eating breakfast at every meal and I’m not complaining.

I get tired of adding cereal to my yogurt so I wanted to make a granola that would taste good (because, let’s be honest, granola can tend to taste like cardboard). So I started out making an oatmeal cookie, and just bypassed that idea altogether and modified the recipe to be granola instead.

Cookies as granola? Sounds like a winner to me.

Five minutes to mix, 15 minutes to bake, and you’ve got something you can eat at breakfast or as a standalone snack throughout the day. And chances are you already have everything you need to make it at home without a trip to the grocery store.

Oatmeal Cookie Granola
A Crumberry Bake Shop Original 

Ingredients

• 8 oz steel-cut oats
• 4 oz All-Purpose Flour
• 4 oz brown sugar
• 6-8 oz butter, melted
• 1/2 tsp salt
• cinnamon, to taste

Process

• Preheat oven to 325˚F
• Mix all ingredients in a bowl, making sure to completely incorporate all the flour so there aren’t any dry lumps in the mix
• Spread the granola on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for 15 minutes, stirring the granola halfway through to make sure it bakes evenly

As easy as this granola is to make, there’s no excuse to ever buy it from the store again, and this way, you can know what goes into it to make it as healthy or as indulgent as you want. Next time I’m adding raisins, chocolate chips (after it’s baked and cooled), maybe some peanuts.. who knows. I’m kind of already looking forward to the fall when I can make a pumpkin spice granola. That’ll be awesome.

Sometimes granola tastes like cardboard. Sometimes it’s awesome. The difference is whether or not you make it or buy it, so get creative. Don’t dis the granola.

I’m starting a new blog category here on The Crumberry Bake Shop, dedicated to weird food news. I’m not even sure how long it’ll last, but for now I’m going to try it, since I don’t have the time to have every post be a recipe post.

Today in What the Fork…

Would you eat food that’d been in Alicia Silverstone’s mouth?

Her son does.

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