December’s recipes for Tuesdays with Dorie are Cheese Puffers and Mokonut’s Rye-Cranberry Chocolate Chunk Cookies. I decided to make the Cheese Puffers first. I was having company for dinner and thought these would be a nice addition. I’m saving the cookies for when my daughter is home from school so she can bake (and eat) them with me.
I loved how easy they were to put together. No mixer needed and the the ingredients were simple. The batter does remind me of popover batter, which I make quite often.
The Cheese Puffers were denser than I expected them to be and a bit greasy. While they had some similarities to a popover, they were much heavier and denser. They almost had the consistency of the “unleavened” Passover popovers that my grandmother used to make.
The batter did sit for longer than I expected before I put them in the pan and baked them because I only have one oven and was cooking and juggling quite a few things at once in order to pull dinner together. I don’t know if the fact that the batter sat for about an hour before I put them in the oven had any effect on their density. They baked for the appropriate amount of time and puffed up beautifully.
These were not as big a hit as the English Muffins, which I’ve already made twice or the Apple Pandowdy which I made three times. However, I may try these again to see if they are a bit lighter if the batter doesn’t sit for an hour first because we really liked the flavor profile.
The recipe for these can be found on page 342 of Baking with Dorie, by Dorie Greenspan.
Even with all that butter in the pan, I still had a bit of trouble getting these out of the tins. They were a mess to clean afterwards.