[Mike Nolan]

The turbinado would have contributed to the flavor and to the color, which is why the cake is a pretty good match with the mocha frosting even though there's no coffee in the cake itself.

[Mike Nolan]

I've always been more of a peach cobbler type myself, but the similarities probably outweigh the differences.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife ran this recipe through the recipe analyzer she uses, it came up at about 38.5 carbs per slice. Using all Splenda cuts that to about 20.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm careful about what I buy at places like Tuesday Morning, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods and Marshalls. Most of their goods are something some other store couldn't sell, for reasons that we don't know.

[Mike Nolan]

Yeah, they're so pretty I'm hesitant to chop them down until they've pretty much finished blooming, and the bees might not appreciate that either. There were plenty of bees for me to take a photo of today, too. We used to have a couple of French pussy willows, and when they would bloom in the spring they would attract so many bees you could hear the buzzing from a good five feet away.

I don't know what hive they came from, I'm not aware of any of my neighbors keeping bees, but someone's getting some lovely buckwheat honey.

[Mike Nolan]

Did you check fantes.com? They seem to have a wider variety of pans than most other places. Mine is 14x5 (and I was wrong, it is a full inch deep.)

What we did in pastry school was to cut 5 strips of puff pastry, one for the bottom and one for each of the sides, adjusting two of them for the thickness of the raw puff pastry. I don't recall but we may have sealed them together with a little egg, and I think we par-baked them so that they were set before adding the filling.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

It does look good, even if it did use a store-bought pastry crust. We made some savory tarts (including a quiche) in pastry class, I think we used a standard mealy pie crust (pate brisee) for them, but a pate a foncier (it has egg yolk in it) would be pretty good in a savory tart. We also made some tarts using puff pastry, I think that'd work well for this, too.

If you allow for 1 inch sides (I think my tart pan has 1/2 inch sides though), a 13x3 pan is about 75 square inches. If you allow 1" sides on a 9" pie pan, that's about 94 square inches, so you'd probably want to increase the amount of filling a little.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Go to a good office supply store, they should have pallet bands. I got a package that had 3 sizes in them, the largest are big enough to hold a 33 gallon trash bag on a large garbage can.

[Mike Nolan]

Buckwheat doesn't seem to me to have a lot of flavor, but I wonder if the bread also needed to be baked longer to let more of the Maillard process occur and generate flavor notes?

I should take some photos of my buckwheat crop, though, I've been postponing tilling it under because the flowers are pretty. Readers may remember that we put buckwheat and alfalfa in as a cover crop in the area we normally use for tomatoes. I'm not sure, but I think the buckwheat may have pretty much crowded out the alfalfa.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

Oh, I hate it when I discover I've left a key ingredient out after it's too late to do anything about it.

I left the corn syrup out of a pecan pie once, I figured it out after I had spent several minutes carefully placing whole pecans on the surface of the pie in nice pattern. So I scraped out everything into a bowl, added the corn syrup, and put it all back in the pie plate, though I didn't bother trying to arrange the pecans in a pretty pattern the second time around. Aside from me, I doubt anyone noticed.

I once made a batch of cinnamon rolls and my wife discovered the next day that the milk I had scalded to go in the dough was still in the microwave! That batch of cinnamon rolls didn't rise quite as much as some, probably because the dough was on the dry side. Tasted OK, though.

[Mike Nolan]

The ratio of cake to frosting isn't changing that much for any one slice, because you get the full top and edge for each slice, it's just not as big. Yeah, there's less frosting on the outside edge, but more on the top towards the center. You want more frosting? Cut a wider slice.

This is kind of a mathematical paradox. If you normally get 12 slices from a cake and you use this method to produce 12 slices, there won't be frosting or cake left over so the cake-to-frosting ratio on average has to be the same.

I'm assuming that first full diameter slice is cut in half, so it's not that much different than a wedge of cake, just not triangular and smaller.

I agree with you about the rubber band, though, that sounds messy, and possibly unsanitary.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 3 months ago by Mike Nolan.

[Mike Nolan]

The last time I canned dill pickles, I used my 24 quart stock pot. We used to have one of those cheap aluminum canning pots, but we got rid of it. It takes a really long time to get 18-20 quarts of water up to a full boil, though.

I think the 24 quart pot would work on an induction cooktop, but the portable induction cooktop we have is far too small to set such a big pot on. They make commercial induction cooktops that would handle my big stock pot, right now I don't know where I'd put it. If we ever have to replace our electric cooktop (on the island), I'd have to think seriously about replacing it with an induction cooktop, even if it would mean we couldn't use some of our favorite pans on it.

I'm becoming a big fan of induction cooktops, although it is enough different from both an electric and a gas cooktop that it requires some re-education.

[Mike Nolan]

The take that CNBC had on this story today was that WalMart, which is lagging well behind Amazon, bought a business with a better model, better software and better managers.

[Mike Nolan]

My experience has been that a blind baked pie shell will stay good in the freezer for several weeks if well wrapped.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife made monster cookies using M&M S'Mores, they added an interesting flavor to the cookies (but they also made them not gluten-free.)

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