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We have a file drawer full of recipes on 3x5 cards, plus 6 shelves of cookbooks and recipes in binders or magazine holders in the kitchen, plus another bookcase just around the corner that has several shelves of cookbooks (plus other books) and several shelves of cookbooks in the basement, too.
And I can think of a dozen or more cookbooks I'd still like to have.
The first step is admitting you have a problem.
Today is my wife's birthday, so I made a 10x10 Texas Chocolate Sheet cake. (1/2 of the batter recipe but about 1 1/3 X the icing recipe, because it's better when the icing is thick.)
The cocoa butter in chocolate has six different crystal states, referred to as alpha-1 through alpha-6. Alpha-6 only forms after a long time, but alpha-1 through alpha-5 will form any time chocolate is heated and cooled. Properly tempered chocolate should mostly or only contain alpha-5 crystals. (Alpha-1 through alpha-4 have lower melting points than alpha-5.)
Streaks in a good chocolate is called 'blooming', which is when some of the cocoa butter loses the desired alpha-5 crystal state and produces a lighter color chocolate. (Cocoa butter itself is white.) This usually happens if the chocolate gets too warm or is not properly tempered. You can leave a chocolate bar in the sun and it'll get warm enough for the alpha-5 crystals to break down, resulting in a white layer on the outside.
A cheaper chocolate may have other things in it that can separate out.
Usually melting and properly tempering the chocolate again will get rid of the streaks. As long as you don't scorch chocolate, you can reheat it over and over.
The issue of whether almond bark should be randomly shaped pieces or more evenly shaped ones is largely a matter of personal preference. Scoring the chocolate as it cools is the best way to get it to break into more even pieces.
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!
I'm guessing this is not a small dog. My experience with bigger dogs is they'll eat almost anything, even if it's not good for them. Cats will sample many things, but usually not go much beyond that. We once had a cat eat a large hunk of store-bought angel food cake, right through the plastic wrap.
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.)
Is there egg in the filling? If so, then it probably needed more egg yolk.
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.)
December 11, 2017 at 12:04 pm in reply to: Cattle are so big butchers have to cut them differently #10155My mother would buy a quarter every few years, it always seemed like it was 2/3 ground beef.
Greg Patent's article from Gastronomica is probably the definitive article on the history of Boston Cream Pie
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.)
Maggi is a seasoning that comes in both liquid and cube form. The ingredients vary depending upon what country you buy it in, but one of the ingredients is usually sodium glutamate.
Here's a page with more information on Maggi
If you haven't posted your peach cobbler recipe (the only one I found in the archives was from S_Wirth), please consider posting it.
I haven't had a good peach cobbler in a long time!
December 10, 2017 at 1:54 pm in reply to: Writer turns bogus London restaurant into #1 rated on TripAdvisor #10131Thanks for finding an alternate source for the article, sites like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal seem to be going out of their way to make it difficult to link to their stories. And because my computer(s) are already logged in to their sites, the links work for me, just not for others.
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