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I’m enrobing what I can of what’s left of the sponge candy today, before it gets too humid and warm and the sponge turns to goo. After you enrobe it, it stabilizes the honeycomb a bit, thought it doesn’t tolerate heat well. (That’s why you generally don’t find it in stores during the summertime.)
There are a lot of really little pieces, so I’m going to try to make something like haystacks with them.
This recipe is as good as the commercial types of sponge candy I’ve had lately, though I do wonder how Rocky Mountain Chocolate Company gets theirs into nice rectangular bars. I will be making it again, but probably not until the fall.
1+Unsweetened applesauce is sometimes used as a substitute for oil, but I don't know if it works in brownies.
I would love to take the Beef 101 3 day seminar at Texas A&M some time.
The water bottle one or the bundt pan one? I've seen the water bottle one done, it works well with a 1 liter soda bottle. It also works better with fresh eggs, as eggs age the yolks are more likely to break.
It doesn't taste anything like a Butterfinger, though. No peanut flavor at all.
The CIA book I listed upthread has a recipe for Snickers-like and Milky Way-like candy bars. The chocolate nougat we made in the candy class I took a few weeks ago tasted a lot like the inside of a Milky Way. I never got around to enrobing any of it, I ate it straight out of the pan.
Enrobed candy packed up and ready for tomorrow's brunch
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You must be logged in to view attached files.Left-overs here, too.
I sent some of our left over Easter ham and rye bread in to my wife's office for an end-of-the-school-year pot luck. (The soon-to-be enrobed sponge candy, I'm just waiting for the chocolate to be properly tempered, is for another departmental get-together on Thursday.)
My wife says that one of the things someone brought on Tuesday was a candy made with oreos and rollos, she said they appear to be fairly easy to make and were awesome. I'll try to get a more complete description tomorrow.
There are several recipes for sponge candy online, but I used the one in Chocolates and Confections at Home with The Culinary Institute of America, by Peter P. Greweling. (2009)
I remember finding what looked like a good one by searching for 'buffalo sponge candy'. The book had a few useful details, like when to add the gelatin and putting the pan back on the stove after adding the baking soda to encourage it to foam up.
Years ago I had a pretty good recipe for making sponge candy in the microwave that I had found online and worked out the timing to my microwave oven, but the book I had all that written in vanished and I couldn't find the original recipe or reproduce it and the timing. Since I've made it before, the CIA recipe was easy to follow.
Some books describe it as a 'regional' candy, it is also called honeycomb candy, angel food candy or sea foam, among other things. Trader Joes sometimes have it. Some candy stores, especially those that specialize in candies from other countries, will carry Violet Crumble, from Australia. In Europe, there's the Crunchie Bar.
I think it's the official candy of Buffalo NY.
It collapsed a bit more than I expected after it was poured into the pan, but for a first attempt it came out pretty good. Tastes right, though I was concerned at first that there was too much honey in it. Now I need to coat a bunch of it with chocolate before I eat it all. I may increase the amount of gelatin I use next time.
I also noted one possible issue with the list of ingredients. It calls for 2 tablespoons of sifted baking soda, which it says weighs 1/2 ounce. Maybe sifting it would cause it to be that light, but according to the USDA FoodData Central database a teaspoon of baking soda weighs 4.6 grams, which means a tablespoon would weigh 13.8 grams or a little under a half ounce. So I used the weight measure rather than the dry measure. Based on the amount it foamed up, that was plenty.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.I made a pan of sponge candy today, using a CIA recipe. It'll be a few hours before I can try to break it up and see how it looks on the inside, but it looks pretty good in the pan. I'm hoping to chocolate coat it tonight or tomorrow.
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You must be logged in to view attached files.Steak, mushrooms and steamed broccoli tonight
The food safety questions on Mondays are intended to deal with recommended safety practices, which I'm sure I haven't always followed, either.
I can recall two times when while hiding Easter eggs we found eggs that had been hidden a year earlier. Needless to say, we handled them carefully and disposed of them.
But I'm also reminded of a cartoon, probably from The New Yorker, in a store where there's a jar of "100 Year Eggs" on the counter, and a customer is asking, "Are they fresh?"
You have my sympathies, the last time I did a ham it came out crunchy, and that's not a good thing.
This time I wrapped it in foil, lowered the initial temperature and heated it for about 90 minutes after marinating it in pineapple juice for 2 days. It was perfect, the rye bread was great, and the potatoes au gratin were probably the best I've made. We also had some strawberries for dessert.
We had a stir-fry for supper tonight.
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