Mike Nolan
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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.
It's a bit more work to clean up after making it, though I just throw the food processor bowl and lid into the dishwasher, but that bread is great toasted.
Hash brown potatoes are sometimes made this way, though most of the time what gets called hash browns are just fried slices of potatoes, usually with some onions. (An improvement on this is Lyonnaise potatoes.)
My mother's favorite post-Thanksgiving meal was potato pancakes made with left-over mashed potatoes and covered with gravy.
Larger supermarkets may have sections catering to vegans and people who are lactose-intolerant, but a health food store might be a better option, if there's one around.
I'm going to have to order Peter's new Perfect Pan Pizza book when it comes out next month.
Creme fraiche is kind of like sour cream, but a bit smoother and less likely to curdle. It's rather pricey.
My wife has a 'Christmas Coffee Cake' recipe that calls for sour cream that was her grandmother's Christmas treat. We've made it a few times but my wife was always disappointed with the taste. Her grandmother was a farm wife and I think she used real sour cream, not that cultured stuff they sell these days.
I've thought about either trying to sour some fresh cream, make some creme fraiche (I've got a recipe for it) or buy some at the store and try that in the recipe, I think it might come closer to what she remembers, although some remembered tastes may be more memory than taste.
I've the quizzes for Saturday and Sunday set, and I've got a few ideas I need to complete the research on for next week. I want to get a bit ahead so that when summer travel and activities start I've got them ready.
I've got marbled rye bread planned for tomorrow (so we can have it with Easter ham), but I want to make another loaf of this bread soon, it makes great toast for peanut butter. Next time I think I'll cut it into 2 parts and freeze half, though, it goes bad fairly quickly.
I find having more than 2 kinds of fresh bread on hand tends to lead to at least one of them going bad, the two of just don't eat that much bread these days. So I tend to cut loaves in half and freeze most of a batch.
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