by Aimee on October 28, 2008
Here I thought, finally a recipe I’m really looking forward to! I should have known that this week would end up being a let down. Yep, this was a New Year’s Eve recipe. I’m not sure if any of you have experienced this. What happens is you get a recipe built up in your mind just like the yearly New Years celebration. For one reason or another things don’t go quite as planned and all that excitement just deflates like a soggy ballon. This is what happened for me in this recipe. I’m not sure why. My main beef is it’s just not sweet enough for me, and a bit dry. It seems that others have had this problem, and have discovered some likely solutions (adding pudding sounds good). Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Chocolate,
Cupcakes,
TWD
by Aimee on October 25, 2008
I had this idea where I’d try and highlight recipes that have caught my eye over the week and “Recipe Round-Up” was born. The original idea was to post this on Fridays, but I wasn’t able to get to it yesterday. Bringing this all together has been a larger task than I expected, but I’ve learned a bunch along the way.
I don’t intend on having a theme every week, but this week it turned out that I happen to be in need of some apple recipes so here we are. In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have a huge baking budget so I’m always on the lookout for cheap supplies and ingredients. For the last couple of months apple prices have been INSANE and I haven’t been able to come up with a reason why I really need apples to justify the expense. Thankfully this apple drought has been broken and I’ve seen apples on sale all over the place. So much so that by the end of the week I noticed that I have about fifteen pounds of apples in the house. I got carried away, what can I say. Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Apples,
Gadgets & Products,
RRU
by Aimee on October 23, 2008
by Aimee on October 21, 2008
It’s Tuesday again and we have another recipe that I probably would have never made on my own. I’m not sure if anyone else has this type of issue. I’ve noticed that when it comes to certain ingredients it’s hard for me to think outside the box. Apple = Pie. Raisins = Babka or Oatmeal Cookies. Peanut Butter = Sandwiches or Reese’s Cups. Pumpkin = Pie or Bread. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fascist when it comes to baking. These equations are instinctive inclinations when I happen to think about certain ingredients. I do bake outside of my instinctual box. I just don’t think muffin immediately when I hear pumpkin. Don’t ask me why. Maybe some psychologist could do a study. Instead of fight or flight, it would be Pumpkin equals Pie or Muffin and what the answer says about humanity. HA! Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Pleasantly Surprising,
Pumpkin,
TWD
by Aimee on October 21, 2008
“Generously butter pan and dust with flour.” You’ve all heard it before. The same required instructions that are supposed to magically render *insert baking item here* from pan without stickage. And yet though it promises much, it delivers little. It never fails that when I’ve tried the butter and flour method of pan preparation I always have trouble getting the damn whatever out of the pan. Have you encountered the same hair-pulling problem? Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Baking Tip
by Aimee on October 16, 2008
Aren’t they pretty? Madeleines have to be one of, if not the prettiest cookies out there (although, that seems to be a topic of heated debate). So I’ve been bitten by the Madeleine bug. I have to tell you though, I think about 90% of my inclination to make dozens of them is just to use my new pan.
I mentioned in that I had come across a recipe for a lemon madeleine using brown butter. I got around to trying it out the other day and I managed to pull it off without dropping anything on the floor, but of course I still had some issues. Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Brown Butter,
Lemon,
Madeleines
by Aimee on October 15, 2008
*Squee* Sorry, I was really excited to become part of this group. So this Tuesday was the Lenox Almond Biscotti. Truth be told, I’ve never been a big fan of biscotti. My mouth always felt like a bunch of shrapnel ripped through it after I ate one. I was pleasantly surprised with this recipe because these are crisp, but not so much so that they damage your mouth.
The recipe was one of the easiest that I’ve tried. The only thing that caused some confusion (and not just for me, others were perplexed as well) was the step when you “…this time standing them up like a marching band…” – this suggested to me that I had to figure out how to stand these things up vertically. I read through those posts on the Tuesdays With Dorie blog and discovered that you just flip the cookies upside down so the bottoms can get crispy. Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Pleasantly Surprising,
TWD
by Aimee on October 14, 2008
Here we go again. I wonder if I will ever be able to bake something without having a step go horribly wrong or dropping something on the floor.
Yesterday I was trying to make those Brown Butter Madeleines I mentioned in my other post. I read through the directions at least twice. I got all ingredients ready to go. Saucepan and butter in hand, I started to brown my butter.
Note to self: DO NOT HAVE TV ON WHILE BROWNING BUTTER Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Butter,
Oops!
by Aimee on October 12, 2008
No, I’m not making a perfume recommendation here. Unfortunately when I was making the Orange-Cardamom Madeleines the other day I became aware of the fact that the large tub full of confectioners sugar I have has a perfume aftertaste.
I wish I had something more concrete to tell everyone, but this is all I got from the manufacturer:
Sugar is good indefinitely, but it can absorb odors when stored next to other types of products. It is possible that the sugar you purchased was stored either in the store or at the retailers warehouse next to or near an item that has a perfume type odor. They have stated that this is not harmful however it may cause the sugar to have an off flavor.
I don’t think the bag of sugar tasted this way from the get go, and the container I have it in was clean and had no strange odors to start with. Where did I go wrong? Maybe it was funny tasting from the beginning and for some reason I didn’t notice it when I used it last. I used to to dust some pecan sandy cookies and they tasted fine, but then the cookie itself was the main flavor contributor in my mouth. Maybe if I hadn’t sampled the glaze by itself before actually putting it on the madeleines I would have never noticed. I don’t know.
Has anyone ever had this experience? Is it possible that there’s some strange chemical reaction from putting it in a plastic container? Inquiring minds want to know.
Tagged as:
Quandaries
by Aimee on October 8, 2008
Stop me if you’ve heard this one… But seriously, according to one tale a French baker and a Polish King would collaborate in bringing to the world one of the most beloved French confections … the Madeleine. There’s as many theories about the origins of the Madeleine as the origins of the Universe, though not as much fervent argument (I think. Uh-oh, maybe I was wrong). My favorite is still the one about the Polish King who became so enamored with the petite cake when he tasted it that he named it after Madeleine, the French servant who baked them. At least King Stanisław Leszczyński had some sweets to cheer him up when he was in exile from his country.
Of course the history of the Madeleine doesn’t just include Kings and Queens. You’ve got your literary references as well. Who can forget it was Proust who gave the Madeleine much acclaim in Remembrance of Things Past. Talk about being enamored, “…at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence … I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal.” Now I’ve been known to drown my sorrows with sweets, but I don’t remember ever having one of those experiences. “I had ceased not to feel … mortal”!? Wow. Maybe I’m just not that type of a writer. I’d love to eat something that made me feel like a superhero.
You may remember from a previous post that I had been in search of a Madeleine Pan
. Fate smiled down on me last week and I found one. I finally got to use it the other day when I made the Orange-Cardamom Madeleines from Martha Stewart’s Cookies
book. Of course my original plan was to do a half recipe of the Orange-Cardamom Madeleines and a half recipe of the traditional Lemon Madeleines. I can’t keep doing full recipes of everything otherwise I’ll be crane-worthy to get out of the house. My plan was bigger than my ability (as usual), and I only ended up with the half batch of Orange-Cardamoms. I’m kind of glad though because I think I’ll end up trying this recipe for the more traditional Madeleines. There’s an article about the baker and a repeat of the recipe here (this is actually where I first came across it, but I wanted a link to the original baker since she did a post about it on her blog). I like the idea of using the browned butter. Click to continue…
Tagged as:
Oops!,
Orange,
Recipe!
