Can't say I've ever noticed powdered sugar that went bad, and I've had some get buried on a back shelf for a couple of years. I will say there's a big difference between brands, the cheaper ones probably use more cornstarch and you can taste that, so maybe that affects the taste over time. My younger son wouldn't eat anything made with powdered sugar because the cornstarch taste bothered him.
Finding decorator's sugar (no cornstarch) is challenging unless you want to buy 50 pounds of it or pay $3 a pound.
I know pastry chefs who will only use powdered cane sugar, not beet sugar, but I've not found much difference between them.
This has been years in the making, but the FDA has banned Red #3 food coloring, though the science behind the ban is IMHO a bit shaky.
It'll take several years for products that currently use red #3 (like Peeps) to reformulate their products.
I wonder how people will make Red Velvet Cake in the future? Will they go back to using beet juice, which was the original way it was colored?
I made a vanilla cake from a box mix. I subbed milk for the water, Greek yogurt for half of the oil and added a rounded tablespoon of flax seed meal (hydrated in an ounce of water) to give it a little fiber (that makes it a health food). I was going to make a simple chocolate frosting but found all my powdered sugar was very much past it's best use by date (I had 2 bags, one older than the other). But I have plenty of chocolate chips on hand so I made a chocolate ganache from some semi sweet chips, added a pinch of instant (decaf) coffee crystals to it. Topped it with shredded coconut. It all came out pretty good.
I baked Whole Wheat Apple Muffins in the afternoon on Tuesday. I adapted this recipe from King Arthur's defunct magazine, Sift (Fall 2019), p. 24. It uses all whole wheat flour. I replaced 8 Tbs. butter with ¼ cup of canola oil, cut the salt in half, added ¼ cup Bob's Red Mill milk powder, and added 2 Tbs. flax meal. I used double the chopped apple, omitted ½ cup raisins, and reduced the walnuts from ¾ to ½ cup. I sprinkled the top with Penzey's Cinnamon Sugar, which has a bit of vanilla in it. As I was using some of my leftover homemade sweetened applesauce, I cut the sugar in half. I added 1 Tbs. of King Arthur's boiled cider rather than 2. I did not have any in the refrigerator, but I had an unopened bottle in the pantry, so I pulled it out to use. While it has a best by date of 2022, I used it anyway. We had a lot of snow this morning, although we were still able to make our local grocery run. My husband has been shoveling snow, so he was happy to have a freshly baked muffin with his afternoon tea, and Annie, our dog, was happy to get some pieces from it.
I am working on using my Winesap apples. For some reason, the ones we got this year are not lasting as well as previous year's crops. Late last week, when I baked the Swedish Apple Pie, I found four rotted ones in the bag. I now have them on a large half sheet pan and will make baking with them a priority.
Thanks Joan and BA.
Tonight's dinner was a replay of yesterday's although I forgot the cranberry sauce!
BA, the sour cream filling sounds good. For mine I just used a little butter and half and half (I have some half and half on hand but otherwise would use milk). I've made them without cheese, with some paprika sprinkled on top. I don't make them often because I usually don't buy large Russets, more often than not I get a bag of smaller Yukon's or red skins.
On Saturday, I baked another batch of Wholegrain Flatbread to go with the hummus I still have in the refrigerator.
I also baked a new recipe, "Swedish Apple Pie," which came from Taste of Home. Although it calls for baking in a pie pan, it does not have a crust and is more of a cake with less cake and lots of apple pieces and chopped nuts. I baked mine in a 9-inch round Chantel dish (one of those items I bought from King Arthur a long time ago when they had more interesting items). I used pecans from the stash that I bought in Georgia on our way back from Florida.
Here is a link to the recipe:
Swedish Apple Pie
We had enough snow last night, about 2 1/2 inches, that we did not go to a planned meeting this morning or the farmers market. That is not a lot of snow, but I did not want to have to clean the car off when we came home. It was also a perfect baking day.
I made a boneless turkey breast. Had it with twice baked potato (haven't made that in years), green beans with carrot and mushrooms and cranberry sauce.
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We had breakfast for dinner, also, Joan. My husband had a TEE today (ultrasound that is done through the esophagus), so he had to fast until the procedure. He was told to eat only soft foods this evening, so I made scrambled eggs with a little mozzarella for him and thawed a container of applesauce. He also had a banana and low-fat frozen vanilla yogurt. I had an omelet with mushrooms, onions, and mozzarella on a slice of wholegrain sourdough bread.
I'm making honey wheat bread today, not so much because we need it (though I don't think there's any in the freezer) but because it is 63 in the kitchen today.
We had more of the cock-a-leekie soup for supper, I skimmed off the fat that had solidified at the top (chicken fat isn't very flavorful), added a little butter for flavor, some more pepper and some basil. I also chopped the chicken up into smaller pieces, Diane thought some of them were too big for a spoon.
It was quite a bit better that way, so I'm adding notes on that to the recipe, as this is a recipe I'll make again. I've still got about a dozen leeks in the garden that I will be digging up over the next month or two, but I think I'll make potato leek soup with the next batch I dig up.
Monday I made a pork butt roast. Roasted it at 250 degrees until it reached an internal temperature of 205 degrees (per a youtube video, that is supposed to be the optimal temperature). It took about 6 hours. It came out pretty tender and tasty. The slow roast cooks out a fair amount of fat.
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The temperature is supposed to be 34 (feeling like 26) by the time I get up in the morning - it was high 60's today. The cold weather is supposed to be here pretty much through next week. And, Will comes home tomorrow, so yesterday I made stock from the rotisserie chicken I bought last week and a batch of steel cut oats for breakfasts. Today, I prepped meatballs and vegetables for Ina's Italian Wedding Soup that I'll put together tomorrow afternoon after we get home - I'm picking him up at the airport and then we're going to Trader Joe's which we always try to do when we're in Jacksonville.
I took a PTO day for tomorrow and I'm glad I did as I didn't realize how exhausted I was from the last two weeks until I stopped.
Doesn't look overbaked to me, but looking at the bottom crust will settle the issue, often the top crust looks great but the bottom one is still half-raw. As long as the top crust isn't DARK brown or black, I don't consider it overbaked.
There was a thread in the Bread Baker's Guild forums a while back where bakers were talking about how they like their breads to look and what sells. The nicely caramelized crusts that many bakers strive to produce sit on the shelf while the ones that are a tepid tan sell out.
In Appolonia Poilaine's book about the Poilaine bakery, there is a recipe for their punitions (sugar cookies), she says they come out all sorts of shades from off white to dark brown, and some customers prefer the light ones while others prefer the darker ones.
I made that recipe and there is a noticeable taste difference between them, the darker ones have more caramelization and that adds flavor complexity. (Biscoff cookies are a perfect example of this; they taste quite spicy, but the only spice listed is cinnamon.) Harold McGee says they have identified at least 1000 different compounds that are created when you caramelize sugar.
In one of Gordon Ramsay's shows a while back (I forget which series), the contestants were asked to bake a pie. In judging them, he cut a slice, scooped off the filling and looked at the bottom crust. If it was soggy at the top, he called it 'raw' and pushed it away without tasting it. Most of the pies failed his bottom crust test. (Some year I want to eat in one of his restaurants to see if I can order a well-done steak that isn't totally dried out, a challenge he's used several times on Hell's Kitchen, giving the contestants 3 identical steaks and asking them to deliver at the same time one rare, one medium-rare and one well-done. I know I can do the well-done one properly, I think I'd struggle to get all 3 done simultaneously.)
Baked custard sounds like baking to me (baked is in the name!)
I'm making a fresh (sweet) cherry pie. Cherries are from Argentina. I don't think I've ever made a fresh cherry pie, so I looked on youtube to get some ideas.
I pitted about 4 cups of cherries and mixed them with 1/4 cup of sugar, then put them in a saucier and cooked them a little. They gave up a lot of juice. I tasted them for sweetness, it was just about right. Then I estimated how much corn starch to use, mixed about 3 tablespoons with 1/8 cup more of sugar and mixed it in the cherries off the heat. It thickened up pretty good, so I'm sure that was the right amount. Then I mixed in a little lemon juice, a big pat of butter and about a tsp of vanilla, stirred it up and it looked just fine. After the filling cooled down, I filled the pie shell (pie crust is the store bought refrigerated kind that you unroll). It's in the oven now, I'll post a pic later.
I made some chicken soup with boxed bone broth, the legs of a rotisserie chicken, lentils, celery, carrots, green beans and a little cabbage (a few noodles too, chicken soup has to have noodles). Had it with a burger.
