Lindacakes

I like to cook with other people, even when I was a kid. My dad and I are making popcorn balls and it's my job to stir the pot with the popcorn in it and it's his job to pour the molten candy syrup in the pot. Somehow, we discombobulated and he poured boiling hot candy over my fingers. The old man grabbed me by the hand, pulled me over to the sink and ran cold water over it. I had a blister that covered the top of my index finger and formed ropy swirls around the finger and onto the next one. After this "healed" the resulting scar was smooth like glass. My knuckle wrinkles hadn't grown back. I called it my "monster finger". The knuckle wrinkles evenutally grew back, it took years, I think. You have to look close to see it now but the skin is thin and sensitive. And somehow, I still insist on cooking with other people over a bowl, arguing about the syncronicity of the pouring and the stirring . . .

I am addicted to something called Red Chile Sauce that I found in Epicurious. It uses dried guajillos and and New Mexico chilis. I put it in little containers in the freezer and put it on lots of things, especially a nice steak/avocado/tomato/black bean salad.

In the Julia Child French Chef series (available on DVD), Julia makes and displays a souffle. Easy to see texture there if you have access to the show.

There are a couple of very useful threads about this already. I just started one a couple of weeks ago myself, asking for advice candying cherries. I can share with you what I learned: A proper cherry was once a brandied cherry, until Prohibition. The maraschino cherry was invented when brandy was outlawed. The process involves bleaching a cherry and replacing the colors and flavors with artificial ones. Cherries are in season right now, and it is a good time to candy your own if you are truly interested. It isn't difficult, it takes a commitment of twenty minutes a day for a week or two, actually less time than that. I started with 3 pounds of sweet cherries. I boiled them for four minutes and then used some of the water to make a simple syrup and soaked the cherries in that. The syrup was drained daily, more sugar added and then added back to the cherries. Right now I am off recipe as I think the cherries are finished and they're just sitting on the counter waiting for me to decide that and do something with them. They have decreased in size, they are not as plump, but they are not bad looking. For days they were brown, but over time they've become a very sexy dark red. They have produced a quantity of deep, thick cherry-flavored syrup that I will likely use for cocktails. I highly, highly recommend doing this for yourself as the result is unmatchable. You cannot buy cherries like these. I have made a fruitcake with chocolate, recipe from Janet, The Old Foodie. It was an exceptional combination and I think a similar cake made with dark chocolate and candied cherries would be absolutely out of this world. You can search for the fruitcake thread for that one. These cherries would also be great in white cake, but they would bleed. One could do a cherry upside down cake rather than a pineapple upside down cake, something like that. The color is really deep and glorious and appropriate, I think, for a ceremony commemorating the joining of two hearts. Good luck -- I think this is a great idea!

Can someone post the recipe for this? I would love to do it myself. Is it possible to make a higher fat percentage butter? I would assume the buttermilk is better than store bought (organic)? I completely would do this if it meant fresher tasting butter and buttermilk, because I use oodles of both. Also, is hard to get buttermilk on a whim and if I was only ten minutes away from it, the pancakes I could make . . .

Just a public service announcement: blueberries are in season. I made a blueberry pie for a Fourth of July picnic yesterday. We actually fought over who was going to get what of the leftovers. Hee hee. I gave it a lattice top and it leaked, oddly, clear syrup. I always put my pies on a jelly roll pan lined with foil. I baked it on the bottom rack, nearest the bottom of the oven. I protect the edge from browning too much with a handmade foil shield -- I found the ones they sell are too heavy and flatten the edge of the pie. In the end, I had to uncover it and brown it a little more before it was fully finished.

Indeed, baking soda quantity is missing. Thank you for taking the time -- utterly fantastic.

Rose Levy Berenbaum's Pie and Pastry Bible is a good source for all this sort of problem-solving.

Thank you both for the help -- I agree with the serendipitous delight inherent in chunks of different sizes, but chocolate shards and dust is another story. It may be the shards and dust factor that added to my cookie's flat chests. Thanks for the tips -- I particularly liked the armpit support system one of the posters describes. I have a warmish body, so the end of the chocolate stuck in my armpit would collapse, leaving me unsupported and probably stab my own eye out with the serrated knife, but I'm anxious to go back and try the serrated knife. I was using a chef's knife.

Those are truly beautiful cookies, by the way. Picture perfect. I even used the paper towel roll trick and mine are not that uniform. Well done. I can't remember if I posted this question, but I'll try anyway: Anyone have a secret for chopping chocolate nicely? I used a brick of Valrhona and ended up with some big chunks, some shavings, etc. Not that this is a big problem in a dark cookie, but it would be nice if the chips could look more uniform.

Thank you for the visual. Those look quite thick compared to what I'm talking about. I've got a bunch of frozen rolls of WPC and I've been trying different things. The 325 degree oven worked better, it did not work well to start with frozen (mainly because I will eat an entire batch of not-baked-enough cookies before I decide they weren't baked long enough, I just can't wait). Baking is rarely a challenge for me, particularly cookies, but mine ain't that puffy. Maybe my baking soda is too old or something. All the same, it is no chore to chew through them.

I'm totally into trying Food of the Gods, too.

Jende, I HIGHLY recommend that you bake another pie immediately. I took a class with Carole Walter to perfect my pie skills -- I told her that's what I was trying to do, make absolutely perfect pie. She corrected my technique and told me to go home and make five more pies that week. It took me two weeks, but I made the five pies (and tried some truly interesting fillings in the process -- like Jefferson Davis pie) and now I can make perfect pie. And it's a handy dandy skill to have. Good luck! Linda

I love this sort of recipe -- epicurious has a marvelous brown rice, broccoli and blue cheese salad that is extraordinary. It's a great take on the ubiquitous white rice/broccoli/American cheese thing my sister-in-law does and thinks everyone else likes. You can change the rice, the veggies, the cheese ad infinitum. I also like a southwestern salad thing with lentils and couscous, corn and black beans.

I think no one directly stated the obvious: cherry pie. When I was a kid, we had a sweet cherry tree in the front yard and a sour cherry tree in the backyard. My mother made stunningly good pies. Lattice top. Cherries are good in salads, both sweet and sour. Vanilla ice cream studded with cherries. I've not tried this with sour cherries, but I might macerate them first. Sour cherry compote to be put up for later use on ice cream, in hot tea, with blintzes. If you brandy the cherries, leave the pits in and the stems on. The pits impart an almondy flavor that enhances the cherry and the stem is just plain cute.

There are some nice ideas here I want to try, but for me, it's all in the construction. Toast and butter an English muffin. Lay strips of bacon across to exactly cover it, trim any overhang. Top with egg salad (hard boiled eggs chopped medium and Miracle Whip). Pepper the top. Eat open faced. Alternately, one can cut the bacon into pieces the size of a penny and mix it in. This can be served wrapped in a lettuce leaf. I would steal that hollowed out perfectly ripe tomato for this. Make a piece of toast, butter it. Add a swipe of Miracle Whip. Slice the hard boiled egg with the classic egg slicer. Carefully lay the egg slices across the bread. Salt and pepper. Eat open faced. I consider the deviled egg to be a variation which embraces the wisdom of mustard. The deviled egg should also be carefully constructed. It is not only not necessary, but grotesque to apply a pastry bag to this process. There was a MW fan above who didn't have another use for it. This is a vestige of my childhood I hang on to beyond my palette's expensive education. Another use -- turkey sandwich. Cannot have turkey sandwich without it.

I am willing to play this little game. I have some recipes at home I'll poke through and see what I've got. One thing that I think is absolutely essential is the dusting of powdered sugar. There is something about the combo of date and powdered sugar that soars. In my house Christmas can't happen without a little number known as a date snowball -- molten dates mixed with Rice Krispies and then rolled (hot - hot - hot!) in the secret ingredient, powdered sugar. My Christmas parties always have this scene in the kitchen: me taking a guest by the hand and bringing her over to the sink to be wiped off after her date snowball orgy. I once had a date bar at a coffee bar that I think of as the best I'd ever had -- it was huge, and the date filling was not only dates. It's been too long now to even guess at what it was, but I completely agree that done poorly, they suck. Done well and they are the epitome of adult sweet satisfaction. That analogy of fly death . . . my god!

Thank you, Dorie, you're absolutely right. I do have the book, but I used a printout from the Splendid Table Web site to actually bake from. I just checked it and it for sure says 350 degrees. You might want to have them fix it.

I did a very smart thing yesterday: I made the World Peace cookies, doubled the recipe and left three nice little logs in the freezer for when the mood strikes. That is one highly addictive cookie. I have one problem: mine baked quite flat (not that this was a problem, the sugar carmelized and made for a crunchy little cookie texture that I liked very much). I used butter, I know butter is flatter than other fats. Is that normal for a Korova/World Peace? Did I overbeat the batter? I have a 6 quart KitchenAid that I'm getting used to -- it's a bit big and I end up overbeating because half of the batter is stuck to the paddle . . . Also: Is there a secret to chopping large slabs of chocolate? I used Valrhona, as suggested, and lots of the chocolate came as chocolate shards instead of chunks. I used a knife and just cut hunks off, and then cut the hunks smaller . . .

I just started a thread about candying cherries -- I'm in the middle of candying three pounds of cherries right now. I did this before, and I used a quick method recipe that involved boiling the syrup and the cherries. This time I'm using a recipe from an old candy-making book, it is more time consuming. I pitted the cherries, I boiled a pot of water and submerged them for four minutes. I placed the cherries in a jelly roll pan so they would all be flat. I took four cups of the boiling liquid and added sugar and boiled it. The cherries rested overnight. Each morning I'm draining them, adding more sugar to the syrup, boiling it and pouring it back over the cherries. At some point the recipe calls for the cherries to be dried. I posted my thread hoping that someone could advise me on that part -- I don't want dried cherries! I want candied cherries! Plump ones! What is nice about this process is that you can put other stuff in the syrup -- a drop of almond extract, some Kirsch, etc. I haven't read the maraschino cherry thread linked above, but I'm certain that a nicely candied cherry enrobed in chocolate would be exceedingly tasty. I'm doing mine for fruitcake, and the derivatives thereof (cookies, tutti fruitti ice cream, etc.)

The recipe recommends adding food coloring to the boiling water for reddness. I opted not to do that. After four days of increasing the sugar in the syrup, they're now a sort of deep dark red, still brown, but a more robust color. I'm thinking I might do some photographs and post the result in recipe gullet. There's very little real information out there about candying, just fruit peel. It's actually not difficult, one just needs to be prepared to spend a half hour playing with the fruit every morning. I'd like to make my own prunes, now known as dried plums, from a better quality of plum than most prunes seem to be made of.

I'm wondering if anyone out there can offer advice for candying cherries -- I bought three pounds of cherries at the Farmer's Market and pitted them, then ditched the recipe I used last year (it's all about boiling the cherries for a long period of time, making a reduction of the syrup) in favor of one of those complicated processes from a really old-fashioned candy making book. So, I plunged the cherries in boiling water for 4 minutes. Used some of the water with sugar added to create a syrup. I've got vats of cherries one cherry thick in my kitchen. Every day I'm pouring off the syrup, adding another 1/4 cup of sugar, boiling it, and then pouring it back over the cherries. I'm on day two of this, it will continue for five days. At which point I go through a drying process of some sort, I go up to like ten days. The cherries aren't red, they're not exactly brown. They've reduced in size. The syrup is still pretty thin at this point. Anyone been through this and care to help me avoid disaster? After the time investment, I'd like to have my two pounds of really delish candied cherries. Also, any other candying advice you may have is welcome, I'm just interested in the process. The more perfect, the better.

I only had one good star fruit in my life, and it was picked fresh from the tree in an experimental fruit farm in Costa Rica and sliced on the spot. I dream about that star fruit. I think the taste is quite delicate, but I'd try this, since you have a lot: stew some fruit, reduce it, make a sort of fruit jam out of it. Blind bake a pie crust, line it with the fruit jam, add a custard that has also been flavored with the fruit jam. When this is done, just as it comes out of the oven so the top is soft enough to gently embrace it, line the top with the cut star slices so that they touch edges and form a pattern. In my head this is quite stunning . . . I might be inclined to cheat a litte and pep it up with some food coloring if it doesn't have much of it's own.

00 is good for pasta.

I've been doing it for forty years, so I'm pretty comfortable. I LIKE the precision.