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devlin

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  • Website URL
    http://www.thevillagebakeryonline.com

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  • Location
    Indiana/Kentucky border, Kentucky Derby country
  1. Thank you all for the help and the suggestions. I'm supposing I'll be able to find a lot of your suggestions at local health food stores and at Whole Foods and the like. I ordered a few vegan cookbooks a couple of days ago and am eager to move on. Went to dinner with friends last night, and though it took a little extra time to sort things out with our server, she was really accommodating and we were able to make special requests to the chef which was nice. I got the impression they get that sort of thing a lot. We apologized for being high-maintenance, but they were lovely about it.
  2. So I have a handful of absolute favorite recipes for baked stuff (cookies, cakes, etc.), and am wondering whether I can successfully substitute for eggs and dairy products. Biscotti and pizzelle, for example. Is there an egg substitute that will suffice? Any recommendations? (and apparently it's only the egg white that I'm allergic to, not the yolk) Milk.... Will soy milk work in a custard? I can't even talk about cheeses right now, lest I begin weeping.
  3. Thanks so much for the feedback. That helps.
  4. We explored the LGs as well, and then it pretty much came down to which one we liked in terms of appearance. The one andiesenji notes above and the GE I link to are essentially identical (though we opted for the one without a water/ice dispenser in the door). For me, the lines of the GE unit are more appealing. But the innards are pretty much the same animal. Weirdly, it was hard for us to find any GEs in stock to look at. Most everybody had LGs on display. At the same time, the fact that my husband is intimately engaged with some of the production elements of both these refrigerators (and other brands as well) decided us on the GE.
  5. Side by side and standard fridges with top freezers have always been a pain in the neck for me. We recently did a pretty thorough search for something that would work better for us, something that had a freezer configuration that didn't involve simply cramming stuff into one compartment, and landed on the GE armoire style refrigerator with two bottom freezer drawers, one of which also has an internal sliding upper drawer/tray which works pretty well. I love this thing.
  6. I'm nearly sold on the Blendtec, but am having a little trouble figuring out whether I should get the standard pitcher with the 3" blade or the larger pitcher with the 4" blade. Does the larger pitcher and 4" blade really outperform the standard pitcher with the 3" blade? Help me out here. Or maybe I should simply go with the option that allows me to purchase both pitchers?
  7. When you make a different SIZED cake, you need to tweak the baking time and temperature to allow the heat to get the different distance to the middle before the outside burns. And if you mess with the time and temperature, you might very well need to mess with the raising agent. (Sadly I have no rules of thumb - but I'd welcome any!) HOWEVER, devlin, you are making cookies. Presumably, standard sized - just three times as many of the things. Being same-sized, no messing with the baking time and temperature. So, just keep the raising agent in the standard proportion. Well, yes, I understand I'm making cookies and not a cake, but the cautionary notes I've read here and there refer specifically to cookies in some instances, which I found confusing and for the reasons you mention.
  8. The flour was new, the butter fine, the eggs just bought. The dough smelled fine, but the cookies ended up with a sort of weird after taste of something that was nearly chemical and salty-like (I used only a dash of salt, as I always have). It's not a new recipe for me either, so I'm flummoxed. That said, I haven't received any messages lately (just checked), so I haven't gotten the recipe yet. Did something go amiss?
  9. It doesn't make any real logical sense to me either, and in my head I ran through exactly the points you raise. The reason I brought it up here is that I'd read somewhere before that both baking powder and baking soda can be problematic when doubling or tripling or otherwise multiplying a recipe, but also because I had already actually baked a batch of pizzelle after tripling the thing and things went badly. Not that you could tell from the dough itself, because it all looked just fine. But once finished, the pizzelle were off, and there was a decidedly bitter taste to them. I don't know what to make of that, all things being equal, but that was my experience, and I was reminded of reading about exactly that issue in the past. Edited to note: I wonder whether making the baking powder and then using that in a multiplied batch might work. Any experiences here with that sort of thing?
  10. Thanks folks. Given everything I've been reading, it sounds to me as if cutting back on the baking powder might be wise. Weighing as opposed to measuring cups.... For sure. Understand, I've been baking artisan breads for several years now in my bakery, so yeah, I weigh everything. Baroness, I'd like to take a look at your own recipe, so I'll pm you. Thanks!
  11. I think this has come up somewhere around here at some point but I can't find where right now. So, I want to triple a cookie recipe (pizzelle) but am concerned that if I triple the baking powder the results will be less than desirable. Is there a rule of thumb someone can share? I've read somewhere that tripling the baking powder will result in a bitter flavor. Is that so? Should I reduce the baking powder?
  12. That looks yummy. Where one might find the recipe?
  13. My spouse doesn't mind some flax seed graininess in a smoothie, but I cannot abide it. It took a little bit of playing around to figure it out, but I finally fixed on a grinding time that works in my own coffee/spice grinder. So for me, it takes a minimum of 70 seconds of grinding to get a fluffy, powder-like flax. After that, it begins to clump into a sort of paste, which is okay as well because it smooths itself out once in the blender. A mortar and pestle is more than I would want to grapple with in the morning.
  14. I simply either spray a small spot in the center or smear a dab of butter in the same spot before I put the parchment in the pan, because it's obviously only useful for keeping the parchment in place, yeah? But I like the Lebovitz method. Nice tip.
  15. As was noted above, flax seed needs to be ground in order for the body to absorb it properly. Also, apparently, the fresher the better, otherwise the essential oils and fatty acids begin to degrade and lose their essential nutrients. Refrigerating or freezing probably helps, and now and then I get ambitious and grind enough to last a week and freeze the stuff. I use a coffee grinder and grind the bejesus out of it -- roughly 80 seconds for the best consistency so there's no grittiness in the smoothy. There's nothing worse than a gritty smoothy.
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