Extra cake or pie dough? Here's how Dallas pastry chefs turn it into something even better - The Dallas Morning News

If you’ve been tossing those last few homemade chocolate chip cookies that went stale, stop that right now. They may be inedible today, but just wait: There’s life in those old cookies yet.

“I would blitz those in a food processor and add it straight to a streusel,” says Jacquelynn Beckman, pastry chef at The Mansion Restaurant at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek. “Instead of using all flour, you could use part ‘cookie flour’ and add a whole other element to what you’re baking. Of course, you can also make a cheesecake crust with leftover cookies.”

Samantha Rush at Rush Patisserie also pulverizes extra cookies and bits of cakes that she doesn’t use into crumbs, not unlike creating breadcrumbs from stale bread.

“If I have too much extra cake, I may dry it out and create a flour with it,” she says, “then keep it in the fridge.” To make her “cake flour” — or Beckman’s “cookie flour,” above — simply pulse your cookies or cake leftovers in a blender or food processor until fine, then lay out onto a cookie sheet and bake in a 200 F to 250 F oven for 20 minutes, because you’re not cooking this again, you’re simply drying it out.

“If something calls for a pound of flour, I’ll do 8 ounces of regular flour and 8 ounces of repurposed cookie or cake flour,” Rush says. “It’s going to add more of a caramelized flavor dimension to whatever you’re making.”

In other words, when the cookie crumbles, make cake — or more cookies.

Jacquelynn Beckman is pastry chef at The Mansion Restaurant at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek.(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

The idea, both pastry chefs say, is to look at the leftovers, as scrappy as they may be, as a component of something else.

“You really have to give it some thought, but there are ways you can repurpose these things,” says Rush, who will make a trifle out of cake scraps along with fresh berries and whipped cream.

"We don't want to waste anything," says Andrea Meyer at Bisous Bisous Pâtisserie. "You can look at excess food as a problem or as something fun."

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Before Bisous Bisous officially opened, Meyer and her team created a framboise cake covered in toasted meringue, several of which they were delivering each week to a client.

“I was consistently saving these trim pieces in a 3-quart bowl, and the whole staff would snack on it,” she says. She also wondered what she could do with the leftover trim pieces from the laminated dough that was cut into triangles for her croissants.

“We thought, ‘What can we do with all of this? How can we repurpose this so people could enjoy it?’ That’s how the raspberry cream cheese cruffin was born — the croissant trim, the excess cake and jam and butter cream from our framboise butter cake — it was our first repurposed product and it was on the menu from Day One.”

Since then, Bisous Bisous has featured chocolate espresso cruffins that use pieces from its opera cake, and now, they’re making cake parfaits out of cake trim leftovers and selling them at the shop and out of the Rendez-Vous food truck at various locations around the city.

These, too, came along because they wanted to reuse what they had. “We had more cake than we could turn into cruffins, so we chopped and diced it into cubes and they’re mini trifles — we’re calling them cake parfaits.”

Meyer says it’s something we could all do at home instead of tossing out what we may have too much of. When you make a layer cake at home, she says, you trim the dome off of the tops so the cake is flat.

“What do you do with the extra cake? For me, it’s a puzzle, it’s a challenge,” Meyer says. “You could at the very least toast it and put it into ice cream. We definitely swirl a ton of stuff into our ice cream.”

Bisous Bisous offers a cake parfait made with lemon buttercream and the cut pieces of a strawberry chiffon cake.(Jeffrey McWhorter / Special Contributor)

What to do with extra...?

Pie dough: If you're making three or four pies and have a bunch of scraps, Meyer suggests you take all of the extra bits, push it together, and roll it out again, then press it into a square and freeze it, or add orange zest to the pie dough, and put orange jam in the middle, fold it over, and make breakfast pastries. "You could make a simple glaze with powdered sugar and drizzle it on top."

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Fruit or vegetable scraps: "If you peel an apple, there's a lot of nutrients and vitamins in the peels and you can chop it really small or juice it and put it into a muffin the next day. You can also do this with carrots and zucchini, and the tops of strawberries," Beckman says.

Cake and icing: "The first thing I think of are cake pops," Beckman says. "That's essentially what it is — leftover cake and icing, and you make little balls."

Croissants: Rush started using croissants in her bread pudding instead of bread, and now she won't make it any other way. "Every now and then we have too much of something, like croissants," she says, "but you could also use old Danish or any sort of milk bread."

Monkey bread is made from scraps of puff pastry by pastry chef Jacquelynn Beckman(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Texas Monkey Bread with Leftover Puff Pastry

1 sheet of scrap puff pastry (homemade or storebought)

1 cup sugar

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 cup butter, plus extra to grease muffin pan

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2 tablespoons whiskey

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Pinch of sea salt

1/2 cup chopped pecans

Heat oven to 350 F.

Cut scrap puff pastry into small strips (around 1 inch by 2 inches, give or take). Combine sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Toss prepared puff pastry into the sugar mixture to evenly coat and set aside.

In a small saucepan, put 1/2 cup of the cinnamon-sugar mixture, along with the brown sugar, butter, whiskey, vanilla extract, and salt and bring to a boil.

Grease your muffin pan with a little butter to make sure the monkey bread doesn’t stick. Pour about 1 tablespoon of hot mixture into each muffin mold. (If you have leftover syrup, you can save for later use.) Sprinkle some pecans into the mold and place your prepared puff pastry pieces in random order, filling the molds about halfway.

Bake for 30 minutes until G.B.D. (golden, brown and delicious). Once you pull them out of the oven and they are still warm, invert your muffin pan onto a plate, and the sticky bun-style monkey bread should just slip out. Enjoy while they are still warm with a cup of coffee.

SOURCE: Jacquelynn Beckman, pastry chef at The Mansion Restaurant at Rosewood Mansion on Turtle Creek

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A cake parfait made with lemon butter cream and the cut pieces of a strawberry chiffon cake is displayed at Bisous Bisous Pâtisserie.(Jeffrey McWhorter / Special Contributor)

Strawberry Chiffon Cake Parfaits

1 1/4 cups cake flour

1 cup plus 4 tablespoons sugar, divided use

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 cup canola oil

3/4 cup water

6 large egg yolks

1 1/2 teaspoons strawberry extract

12 large egg whites

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1 pint fresh strawberries, sliced

Lemon Buttercream (recipe follows)

Heat oven to 350 F. Grease bottom of a 9-inch round or square pan.

In a large bowl, sift the cake flour, 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar, and baking powder. In a separate bowl, whisk together oil, water, egg yolks and strawberry extract, and gradually add to the dry mixture. Stir and scrape sides as needed.

In a separate bowl, make the meringue by mixing 12 large egg whites with the remaining 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar until soft peaks form. Fold the meringue into batter and pour into pan. Bake 18 to 20 minutes or until the cake springs back to the touch and has pulled away from the edges of the pan slightly. While the cake is baking, make the Lemon Buttercream (recipe below).

Once the cake is cooled, level the cake by cutting off the top dome with a serrated knife. Cut the excess cake into even chunks and layer with freshly sliced strawberries and Lemon Buttercream in a small cup for a delicious cake parfait. (Ice the rest of the cake as you normally would.)

Lemon Buttercream: Add 1 cup sugar and 1/4 cup water to a pan and heat to 240 F. In a separate bowl, whip 6 large egg yolks to ribbon stage. Slowly stream sugar-water liquid into eggs, continuously whipping until cooled. Gradually add 1 1/4 cups softened butter chunks and 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract. Stir until smooth and creamy.

SOURCE: Andrea Meyer, chef/owner of Bisous Bisous Pâtisserie

Cinnamon pie twists made from the scraps of pie dough at Bisous Bisous Patisserie.(Jeffrey McWhorter / Special Contributor)

Cinnamon Sugar Twists

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2 1/2 cups pastry flour

2 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons sugar

1 3/4 cup butter, cold, in chunks

3/4 cup cold water

Cinnamon-Sugar (recipe follows)

Combine flour, salt and sugar. Cut in butter. Make a well, add water, and work into the dough by hand. Put dough onto floured surface of table and continue mixing by hand (chunks of butter may still be unevenly distributed). Flatten and hand-mold into a disc, wrap tightly with plastic wrap, and store in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour.

Heat oven to 325 F. Roll pieces to 1/8-inch to 1/16-inch thick, cut into 1-inch wide strips and toss in Cinnamon-Sugar mixture. Twist lengthwise, place on baking sheet lined with parchment paper, and bake until brown and crispy, approximately 10 to 12 minutes.

Cinnamon-Sugar: Combine 1 cup granulated sugar with 2 teaspoons cinnamon.

SOURCE: Andrea Meyer, chef/owner of Bisous Bisous Pâtisserie

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Refreshing Summer Ice-Box Lemon Cake

10 ounces cream cheese

1 can sweetened condensed milk

1/2 cup fresh lemon juice

1 teaspoon lemon zest

4 to 6 cups dry cookies/dry cake scraps

Whipped cream, for garnish

Candied lemon slices, for garnish

Slowly beat cream cheese and condensed milk on a mixer with the paddle attachment until smooth. Add lemon juice and zest and mix until smooth.

Line a loaf pan with plastic wrap so that the plastic is hanging over on all sides.

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Place a layer of dry cookies/cake in the loaf pan to cover the bottom of the pan. Spread 1/2 of the lemon filling mixture over “cake” layer. Repeat with another layer of “cake” and lemon filling.  Add a final layer of “cake” and fold the ends plastic wrap onto the “cake.” Lightly press or tap the loaf pan to compress the cake. Refrigerate at least 6 hours.

Unmold the chilled cake by inverting the loaf pan onto a plate. Remove the plastic wrap and slice. Garnish with whipped cream and candied lemon.

SOURCE: Samantha Rush, Rush Patisserie

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