Check health food stores or places that sell spices in bulk, they usually have cream of tartar (aka tartaric acid) in bulk. Should be less than a dollar per ounce.
Bulkfoods.com has it in 1 pound packages for $8 or 5 pound packages for $25 (plus shipping), but those tiny containers are around $50 a pound!
Tuesday evening, I baked Swedish Lucia buns to celebrate Saint Lucia's day on December 13. I never had the chance to know my Swedish grandmother, as she died when my father was an infant, so I try to recover some of those traditions.
The bake was not without incident. (See discussion thread about never turning your back on softening butter.) I have not baked this recipe for at least a year, and perhaps it has been two years. The basic recipe comes from Betty Crocker's International Cookbook, but I have played around with it over the years. I now use the special Gold yeast and substituted in a cup of white whole wheat flour. I've found that I also use a cup less flour (4 1/2 rather than 5 1/2) than in the book's recipe. I added 2 Tbs. potato flour because I have it and want to use it up. I'm not sure that I will order that ingredient again. They came out well, but they perhaps should have baked another minute or two. They are still good.
Tonight I am baking Lucia buns. I had butter softening on the kitchen counter. I went to brush my teeth, and when I returned the butter was still on the counter, but not where I'd put it before dinner, and it looked like some of it was missing. A guilty looking dog registered my displeasure as I realized what had happened. I weighed the butter, and sure enough, 1/2 Tbs. was missing. (I had cut it into sections to warm faster.) Although she has on three occasions nabbed a baked item that was cooling, she has not in the past gone after ingredients. I never thought she would be interested in butter.
I have tried to locate the original source for this recipe without luck. Unfortunately, in the 70's I found lots of recipes in magazine advertisements and articles and never noted the source on most of them. This is a good basic recipe with a biscuit-type topping both of which can be tweaked to suit your personal taste.
COBBLER AND TOPPING
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
In a saucepan, mix 1/2 cup sugar with 1 tablespoon cornstarch
Gradually stir in one No. 2 size can of fruit
Bring to a boil and boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Pour into a 1-1/2 qt. baking dish. Dot with butter, sprinkle with cinnamon and set aside while preparing the topping.
Sift together 1 cup flour
1 T. sugar
1-1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
With a pastry blender, cut in 3 T. shortening until it looks like cornmeal.
Stir in 1/2 cup milk (it will be thick and sticky).
Drop by spoonfuls on to the hot fruit. Bake for 20 - 25 minutes or until the crust is golden brown. Serve warm.
6 - 8 servings
Websites come and go, for a variety of reasons, so you can't always count on a website being available or having certain content for years.
Did you ask if it was OK to post their recipe here?
A friend makes a chicken salad with grapes and mandarin oranges, It's the best chicken salad I've had. (Recipe is already posted.)
A few years ago we ( me,my husband and friends) attended the annual Gettysburg Holiday Tour. One of the B&Bs served their signature chicken salad and it was the best chicken salad any of us had ever tasted. It had raisins, banana, orange juice, cranberry sauce, orange yogurt.... I looked the recipe up online and found it so I thought that I could find it again when I was ready to make it. Well guess what it can no longer be found online (another subject). Anyway I tracked down the inn where it was served and they sent me the recipe. This will be our dinner this evening.
It doesn't really qualify as cooking or baking but I made several trays worth of chocolates using Christmas themed molds last night (santas, trees, stars, snowflakes, etc.)
When I was a sophomore in high school, my father bought a raffle ticket from a man in his car pool whose son was in the marching band. One of the prizes was a side of beef--and my father had the winning ticket. That was what my mother needed to persuade my father to buy a full upright freezer for the garage. (It was southern California, so that was an ok location.) The meat came pre-cut. As I come from a large family, I am sure that my mother used every bit of it, but I do not recall what we ate or how it was prepared. I've come a long way in my attention to food. Back then, my focus was completely on baking cookies or banana bread.
Interesting. We get big (50lb+) cuts. No sides of beef that I've seen but we also do not have the room to store them or break them down. But we will get an entire rib cage. They offered to teach me how to use the band saw and break things down but I have to admit to being a little intimidated. It's also incredibly loud and no one wears ear protection. If you were using the same thing in a wood shop you'd have your ears covered.
We have shanks every week if not every day. Usually beef and lamb and sometimes pork. We always have bones in the freezer from the meet we cut. Yesterday we even had pork jowl which I have never seen except on a living pig.
We're far from perfect but the thing I like about the place I work and the store where I shopped before I started working is that there are people who are passionate about what they do. It's a mission for them and they take pride in what they do. There are not a lot of grocery stores around here like that.
And there are some folks in grocery who know nothing about what is in the baking aisle and tell customers that there is no real difference between cake flour and AP flour but I am working on that. 😉
I hope your cold oven is cold enough, pastry cream should be kept cold, so I've always assumed Boston Cream Pie should be, too. Stores always keep pre-made ones in the refrigerated case.
A few years ago I was on a Boston Cream Pie quest, I made it at least a half dozen times, with various cakes, types of pastry cream and toppings. Never did find the perfect combination, they were all pretty good, though. I like the cake to have a hint of almond in it, enough so you can tell there's something there but not really get hit with ALMOND! The one that had a mixture of my mother-in-law's pastry cream and a classic creme patisserie was the best filling. These days I tend to use the pastry cream recipe in the KAF Baker's Companion, but sometimes with an extra egg yolk. The pastry cream we made at pastry school was so thick it was almost hard to pipe, but boy it was good.
I did get confirmation that the original topping on a Boston Cream Pie was a chocolate fondant (made with confectioners fondant), so it gets fairly firm, rather than a softer ganache, but nearly every modern recipe uses a ganache, and I'm OK with that.
One of the things we talked about a little in chocolate school was how to adjust the firmness and texture of a ganache. (To make it firmer, you add more cocoa butter.) I'd still like to take the 3rd course in the chocolate sequence at the Chocolate Academy some year, it deals with designing your own ganaches.
I've had twice baked potatoes, I was wondering if mashed potatoes made this way would have some similarity with twice-baked potatoes for flavor. Recently we've been settling for instant mashed potatoes.
The WSJ recipe keeps the skins on, and then you mash them, so the skins aren't removed. I can't say I'm all that fond of potato skins in my mashed potatoes, though I do like potato skins. When we have baked potatoes, I eat the whole potato, including the skin. But mashed potatoes should be creamy smooth, without lumps or pieces of skin in them--or garlic!
One of these days I want to try making Joel Robuchon's recipe for pommes puree. (As my wife says, well at least they'd be lower in carbs, since there are no carbs in cream and butter.)
Today I made a Boston Cream Pie. Turns out KAF has revised the recipe since I last made one in August. And, I don’t know the changes between the new and the old recipe since I didn’t copy it. The recipe was pretty straight forward but I still made it in 8” pans so I have two nice tall layers. They did create a pastry cream with proportions just for this recipe instead of using half a recipe of their pastry cream (no heavy or whipping cream for the Boston Cream pie). It used 2 ½ cups milk and 3 egg yolks, 1 whole egg instead of 3 cups milk and 4 egg yolks. It set up much better, but because my layers were smaller, the layer of cream was thicker which is fine by me. I used the ganache from the big batch brownies for the top.
I had put it on my cake stand and it’s so tall that I took the racks out of my cold oven and set it inside for the night. I also wrote a big sign not to turn the oven on?
I also tried BakerAunt’s eggnog cake. Since I forgot to set my timer I may have over baked it - it was a little dry. Sadly, we couldn’t detect too much eggnog flavor - maybe it will be better tomorrow
I made Ann Lander's meatloaf. Recipe below. I did not use MSG, and I have no idea what maggl is. As I recall recipe printed in Chicago paper said to use Accent (is Accent MSG?), and it called for bacon over the top. I also don't use the bacon.
http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/original-ann-landers-meatloaf-506606
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This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by
Italiancook.
It was also a good day to bake in northern Indiana, as we had between 8-10 inches of snow yesterday. The temperature did get above freezing, but it is on the way back down.
Sunday afternoon, I again baked a brownie variation called Brickle Bars (Better Homes and Gardens New Baking Book, p. 219). I reduced the amount of almond brickle and mini-chocolate chips that I sprinkled on top and instead used some green candy sprinkles with red ball sprinkles. These somewhat melted into the top, but there is still a festive red and green.
In addition, I baked a new recipe, Cherry Cardamom Loaves, which came with a Nordic Ware Christmas pan that makes eight mini-loaves (6 cup capacity). I'll add an addendum to this post once we have tasted them. It was rather nice that all the mixing is by hand, and it uses melted butter.
Note: the loaves are definitely better the day after they are baked when the flavors have had a chance to blend. However, I can take these or leave them, so I doubt that I'll bake them again.
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This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by
BakerAunt.
I won't post a link (since Wall Street Journal links don't work far too often), but the WSJ has a meatloaf and mashed potato recipe that starts by roasting the potatoes in the oven for 40 minutes rather than boiling them. The meatloaf has a tablespoon or so of bourbon in it to give it a smoky flavor and is baked on a sheet pan rather than in a loaf pan, which cuts the cooking time significantly. I may have to try that some time. (Not sure about the bourbon part, though I do occasionally use it to make pecan pie.)
Has anyone ever tried making mashed potatoes by roasting the potatoes rather than boilng them?
