TWD: Baking with Julia - Popovers

Wow.  What a fun pastry!  This week's Tuesday's with Dorie/Baking with Julia recipe is Popovers!  Seriously, these are so easy and look so cool when they come out of the oven, these need to become a dinner party staple!  Guests will be amazed at your amazing pastry skills and we will keep the ease of this recipe our little secret! Many thanks to Paula of Vintage Kitchen Notes and Amy of Bake with Amy for hosting this great recipe!  I highly suggest that you turn to page 213 of Baking with Julia or visit these two blogs to get this recipe!

To make popovers, you simply dump all of the ingredients into a blender, or have your sous chef do it for you!

When I say "all of the ingredients" even that sounds like more than it is.  We are simply talking about flour, milk, salt, eggs and melted butter, friends.  That is it.  The recipe calls for whole or 2% milk, both of which were missing from my kitchen at the moment I decided to make these popovers, so I used skim milk and added an extra 2 tablespoons of melted butter.  It worked!

Pour the batter into popover pans (1/3 c for each) or muffin cups (1/4 c for each).  I don't own popover cups, so I used muffin tins.  Again, the metal one and the silicone one.  Seriously, I need another metal one so I can get rid of this silicone thing.  I am just not in love with it.  For the purpose of popovers however, it worked just fine.  Since popovers get ginormous in the oven, butter every other muffin hole, in a checkerboard pattern, to give those popovers some room.  They need it!

Then they just bake away.  The clever girl was busy coloring in the kitchen while they baked, and enjoyed looking up at the oven every so often to see how big they were growing.

Ta-da!  Eat them at dinner time with whatever dinner you might be having, as you would a dinner roll.  If you have never had a popover before, they are super light and airy.  In fact, airy isn't even a strong enough word.  When they poof in the oven they are pretty much blowing up like a balloon, so the inside is almost hollow.  "Almost" because there will be some yummy thin soft bits on the inside here and there, but for the most part you are eating a crunchy outer crust of the popover.  Mmm.

Or eat them in the morning with some melted butter and honey drizzled over the top.  (sorry for the out-of-focus picture...)  Or make some compound butter - maybe an herb one for dinner, or a strawberry one for breakfast?

Just remember these are best eaten as soon as they come out of the oven and are still nice and hot, so plan accordingly!

These are so good and easy they kind-of make me want to buy a popover pan...

Like I really need more baking pans...

I should probably make do with the muffin pan option for a while...

sigh...