Patrick S

Almost certainly, they all refer to weight.

I'm not at home, but I remember that the glaze recipe uses Oetker clear glaze. I think that curls of lemon and orange peel were steeped in the glaze and then removed, but I'm not certain on that because I only used the recipe once.

Where can I find recipes for pate de fruit? I google it, but only found 1 recipe from Food Network. ← You'll have much more luck using the phrase fruit jellies.

Its hard to see the cookies, but my best guess would also be that your dough was too warm.

Megan, I loosely followed this recipe. I used white wine vinegar instead of rice wine vinegar, and I doubled the sauce ingredients because I was using closer to 2lbs of chicken.

I don't see how that could be the case, since both beet and cane sugar are 100% sucrose, right? ← I do know that when one is making candy, one of these sugars behaves differently and boils much higher in the pan than the other. Can't remember which. ← I've never compared the two side-by-side, but I have made candy with both beet and cane sugar and never noticed any difference in how the behave during boiling. And since both cane and beet sugars are 99.9% sucrose, I'd be surprised if one boiled much higher in the pan than the other. There are unrefined cane sugars like demerara and turbinado that are only like 96% sucrose, though, and I wouldnt be too surprised if they boiled differently than 99.9% beet sugar.

I don't see how that could be the case, since both beet and cane sugar are 100% sucrose, right?

Wow, I've never heard of sugar allergy before! I thought all food allergens were proteins. Can your brother eat other types of sugar?

Tonight, I tried to duplicate the kung po chicken I had at P.F. Chang's last weekend. While I didn't actually succeed in duplicating the dish, the result was delicious, and I was pretty stoked. I didn't have any red peppers, so all the heat came from the Sriracha sauce. Last night my neice was over, and since she loves pizza thats what we had: A few nights before that, we tried making some meatball subs:

I used one bottle of NM vanilla paste. Flavor-wise, I thought the paste was no better or worse than extract. I used it in lots of different recipes with no problems.

Yes, that's a safe assumption. In the US at least, it would be a clear-cut violation of labelling laws to sell a product with that label if it contained a lot of glucose.

I'm not sure how foods sweetened with HFCS could have a significantly different effect on cardiovascular system than old-fashioned sucrose derived from cane or beets. Remember, sucrose is 50% fructose and 50% glucose, while the HFCS used in most food products is 42% fructose/58% glucose or 55% fructose/45% glucose. So, in most cases, a product will have very similar amounts of fructose and glucose regardless of whether it is sweetened with sucrose or HFCS.

My beans came in the mail. They look nice and have a nice aroma which is a little different from Bourbon beans. They are moist and fresh. I made a vanilla anglaise tonight to try the beans out. I used one and a half beans, about 10" worth of bean. With a Bourbon bean I would use half a bean and get a strong vanilla flavor. The flavor of the anglaise with Tahitian is not bad, but it really is very weak. I think the best way to use these is going to be in conjunction with extract to make up for the missing vanillin.

Orange-Cardamom cupcakes. They're pretty ho-hum.

Good point, Samuel. Doronin, I found information on CornSweet brand fructose, which is manufactured by Archer Daniels Midland Company. It is minimum 99.5% fructose, and maximum 0.5% glucose. See here (PDF file). You can buy an 8lb can for $10 here.

Okay, there are HFCSs with at least three different levels of fructose concentrations: HFCS 42, HFCS 55, and HFCS 90, with 42, 55, and 90% fructose concentrations, respectively. So they are available up to at least 90%, and presumably that is what Fructose powder would be made from.

I don't know if the powdered "Fructose" is 100% fructose or not, but my understanding is that HFCS can be made to any arbitrary fructose concentration depending on how thoroughly the corn syrup is treated with invertase enzymes, which convert glucose to fructose. So depending on how high in fructose the HFCS is to begin with, it could be crystallized into a powder that is 40,50, and -I'm assuming- 90+% fructose. Some corn syrup has only like 10-15% fructose, and would produce a powder with a GI higher than table sugar. But if the starting HFCS was very high in fructose, let's say 90%, the resulting powder would be little different from 100% fructose in terms of of glycemic index.

I believe them. When I make a cappuccino I always pour the espresso into the cup before the steamed milk. I swear it tastes different if I pour the milk first into the cup and then the espresso. I'm not crazy...honestly. ← No, you're not crazy. For proof, check out The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, by David Salsburg. Believe it or not, the question of what difference it made whether tea was added to milk or milk added to tea very briefly occupied one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Ronald Fisher. A woman at a tea party Fisher attended said she could tell the difference between tea made by adding milk to tea, and tea made by adding tea to milk. Fisher said that was nonsense, and designed a blind tasting experiment to test for this ability. To Fisher's suprise, the woman accurately identified each of eight cups as being tea+milk or milk+tea.

This page gives some information on the various types of extracts. I think most commercial extracts are made from the species Vanilla planifolia (aka Bourbon vanilla), since the other common vanilla species, Vanilla tahitensis (aka Tahitian vanilla), has very little vanillan, which is the major flavor compound in vanilla. I'm sure differences in climate, curing and so on make even genetically identical vanilla plants taste subtely different (i.e. by encouraging or discouraging the formation of different flavor compounds), but I'm not in a position to say what those differences are or how apparent they are to the taste.

Ina Garten has a new recipe for chocolate cupcakes that is very simple and produces a moist, fudgy cupcake. It uses chocolate syrup, so if you don't like the taste of Hershey's syrup you might not like them. I made them for work and they were very well recieved. I covered with bittersweet ganache to balance the sweet cupcake. Chocolate ganache cupcakes

Think long-term. Use it every day for 300 years, and it more than pays for itself in labor savings.

Thanks so much Wendy, Anne, Jennifer, Lucy, and jackal for this useful thread!

I am so confused.....WHICH one did you like? ← Why so confused? yellowmnm81 prefers the CI cookies.

Okay, in biology, a subject with which I am more familiar than I am with buttercreams, there is a fairly easy way to resolve disputes like this. The name that is first assigned to a certain species has priority. Someone may come along and observe the same species and, not knowing the species has already been given a Linnean name, give it a new and different name. Eventually, when it is discovered that the same species has been given two different species names, the earlier name is given "priority," and the later name is regarded as an "invalid taxon," and discarded. The best example is Brontosaurus of Flintstones fame, which is now considered an invalid taxon for Apatosaurus. So, applying this logic in a tenuous way to buttercreams, I would say this: if "French Buttercream" originally referred to a buttercream made with yolks, syrup and butter, I think it is arguably "invalid" for someone to later apply the very same name to a very different (maybe equally delicious) concoction, in the way that Wilton does. Do I really care? Not at all. But this kind of thing does breed confusion.

The lemon chiffon cake is my favorite from that book, but I increase the juice and zest a little.