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All of you are cooking such wonderful things! I had oral surgery to remove a tooth so I can only eat soft things. I finished up the last up the last of the lemon meringue pie myself, but found the crust was harder than I liked. I'll try more blind pie crusts later.
I admire the Swedish Lucia buns and the butterhorns and all the cookies. They all sound fascinating.
Does anyone have favorite recipes that use almond meal? I bought a bag for one recipe that only used 1/2 a cup so I have most of the bag left. I thought perhaps Scottish Shortbread with almond meal subsituted for part of the oat flour.BakerAunt;
Thats an impressive amount of snow! Where do you live? I'm surprised that your dog didn't eat everything, the cattle dog I knew had an impressively good digestion.RiverSide Len;
The chicken looks wonderful! Does it cook more evenly this way than lying on its side?Mike Nolan;
Thanks for the information about Chocolate Bloom! You are the best! The chocolate bark was thin enough to break without problems even after it was completely cool, but I had little control over the size. I like the random size pieces but I will try scoring it next time.
I'm not sure there should be a next time, I was sampling the bark rather freely as I was breaking it up and putting it away and might need to avoid temptation.
Since you are a chocolate expert how would you make chocolate pieces for pan au chocolate? I've seen little bars at KA for that purpose and looked unsuccessfully for chocolate molds.This morning I melted a 1 lb block of good Dark Chocolate to make chocolate bark. I had had the block for about a year and it showed brown streaks on the surface. It melted fine and I poured it on parchment paper in a thin sheet and put pecans and dried cherries on the surface. However now that it cooled it has swirls of light brown color on it. What caused this?
Is there any general advice for making chocolate bark? I broke up the bar of chocolate, melted about 2/3 in a double boiler over hot water, removed from heat, add the rest of the chocolate and stirred till smooth. This is what I did last year for filling chocolate molds.
Do I need to break up the chocolate bark while still warm? Right now I am letting it cool completely which might be the wrong thingI did Pizza on December 9th. This is my default deep dish whole wheat pizza. I took it to Martial Arts practice and it was well recieved.
Yesterday I baked my fourth Lemon Meringue Pie with buttermilk Pie crust and it was a success! I reread all your directions and advice. I refrigerated the pie crust, took it out and remixed it and then refrigerated it again. The pie crust dough had clumps that were too moist and crumbs that were too dry. I rolled it out again to somewhat larger than the pie pan. The pie pan had holes in it. I draped the pie crust over the outside of the pie pan, and then placed the pie pan in a 14 inch deep pizza pan with the pie pan on the bottom and the crust on top. I then refrigerated the whole thing again. I refrigerated this for several hours -- I had other things to do. THen I heated the oven to 415 degrees and after the oven was hot, took the pie crust out of the refrigerater and pricked it with a fork. I baked for 10 minutes until lightly brown, then I put the other solid pie pan over the crust and turned it over. I took out the original pie pan, and now I had a half baked pie crust inside a pie pan. I baked the pie pan for 4-5 minutes using the pizza pan to make it more manageable and prevent any butter from dripping out, until it was golden brown at the edges and slightly brown in the middle.
I then use KAF 200th Anniversary cookbook for the Lemon Meringue. I used 2 lemons for the zest and about 1/4 cup lemon juice.
The pie crust is perfect, but the lemon filling is a little soft.I have "Black Twig", Winesaps, Staymans, Northern Spy, Nittany, Cortland, Crimson Crisp, Empire ( if I didn't eat it ) in my refrigerator and possibly some others. The sellers at the Farmer's market had many varieties and the late fall is the best time for apples. There are a lot of apples at the grocery store like Pink Lady and Jaz and Encore which are still rather uncommon.
Jonathans are good apples for cooking, I am told. I hope you have good sweet rolls. They are a little too tart for me but many other people like them.
I bought two "Sheep Nose" apples this fall which were new for me. The first one tasted harsh and green, so I sliced it up and fried it with butter and brown sugar and ate it for breakfast. I waited two weeks and tried the second one and it still tasted green, so I fried it too. It was great that way. The seller later told me that "Sheep Nose" apples were an acquired taste and that the apples were probably completely ripe.
I was surprised to learn that Winesaps and Staymans are different varieties -- I thought they were color variations . They taste similiar.For Thanksgiving I did pumpkin corn bread with basically a Northern style corn bread with pumpkin puree instead of buttermilk. I also added spices -- cinnamon, allspice, ginger and nutmeg and cranberries. I did an apple pie with Northern Spy, Winesap, Cortland, and Cinnamon Crisp apples. The day after Thanksgiving I baked a 20 lb Long Island Cheese Pumpkin. The flesh was a nice dark orange, nearly red in contrast to the skin which was more beige. The flesh also seperated out into strings like a spaghetti squash. The pumpkin was so big that I baked only half the pumpkin at a time. I baked it for about an hour until tender than let it cool. I then ran it through a food mill. The baked pumpkin produced a lot of liquid which I then stirred back into the puree. It made 10-12 pints of pumpkin puree which is now in the freezer for future breads.
I had previously cooked a Long Neck Pumpkin into puree. This looks like a giant warped butternut squash. The flesh is more yellow and less moist. This was the pumpkin I used for the pumpkin corn breads.
Oh thanks for all the information on blind baking a pie crust. I will try that again when I find time.On November 8th, I did two variations on whole wheat apple scones -- one of them was apple raisin and another was apple-walnut. I will be baking with apple themes for quite a while. I bought half a bushel at the farmer's market and then asked a friend to bring more from New York and then bought a couple more different varieties that I didn't already have in my refrigerator. I had bought a book by Tom Burford of 123 interesting and useful apple varieties. This is an amazing book with pictures of many different apples and descriptions of not only the fruit and history but also something of the uses and keeping qualities.
For example the York apple, which I always thought of as a pie apple was once popular as a dessert apple. It keeps splendidly!I made low fat Vanilla CHeese cake from Susan Purdy's "Have your cake and eat it ". I had had a Doctor's appointment and the scales persuaded me it was time to try low fat cooking again and make it for other people's birthdays so they can be stuck with the left overs. The cake used 1 1/2 packages of low fat cream cheese and 2 cups of low fat vanilla yogurt. It also used a few tablespoons (3 ) of Cheerios for a sort of crust subsitute.
This was tasty enough but it differered from a full fat cheese cake by being much smaller. There isn't a crust, there is barely a sprinkling of cheerio dust on the bottom, and the cheese cake ended up about 1 inch high or less, as opposed to the 2 inches of a real New York Cheesecake. I baked it in a 9x13 pan.
The strawberry glaze made with frozen strawberries was red and tasty and completely fat free.
The good part is that it was tasty, and Sam, whose birthday it celebrated, liked it. The bad part was that it was tiny.It was cool enough Saturday October 14th to do some baking. I did whole wheat scones with diced apples. Very good.
I just bought a 12 oz bottle of Watkin's Natural Vanilla. It was $29.99 + tax. I last bought a bottle several years previously and I remember it as expensive but not this bad.
I baked a cheese pizza and two loaves of ginger bread. Completely boring but tasty!
I have put a large cake carrier with cold water in it, and then float the dough in a metal bowl in the cake carrier with the lid on. The cake carrier is one of the large plastic ones, and is upside down also. This gives me a somewhat colder environment for a couple of hours until the water warms up to room temperature. It works nicely to keep the dough from drying out.
I think a cooler with cold water or an ice pack will keep the dough cool over night. How cold do you want the dough? Water with ice cubes might make it too cold. -
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