Patrick S

Tea works great for those who can't hang with the shroom mouthfeel. Crumble. Put in coffee maker. Brew. Drink. Trip.

I never heard there was any distinction between hazelnuts ands filberts, and have always considered those two words synonymous. ← Most people do use filbert and hazelnut as synonyms. I always have. But some people use the word filbert to refer to two specific European species of Corylus or hazelnut, C. avellana pontica and C. maxima, which are slightly different from 'hazelnuts' from the American species C. americanus.

I definitely would. I think toasting really brings out the flavor in most nuts, including hazelnuts.

When I toast hazelnuts, I toast em til they beg for mercy. Or until they're almost black. Whichever comes first. Once the skins are blackened, if you rub them firmly and vigorously in a towel, you really can get 90%+ of the skin right off. If you dont black the skins, they dont come off very well. Also, toast more than you need, so that you can toss the nuts that are particularly buggery and refuse to shed their skin. The other method is to blanch them with water and baking soda.

That recipe calls for 1/2 cup ground nutmeg. I can just see the kiddies pelting the humble cook mercilessly with brown 'spiceberry' cupcakes. Hehe. I made a big batch of strawberry preserves with framboise to use for cake making. I think I'll try the first posted recipe, and use the gelatin for one of the cakes and leave it out of the other, so I can compare.

Unless you have a subscription to NEJM, you won't be able to download that paper. But I found a copy of it here: Hu et al, 1997. Dietary fat intake and the risk of coronary heart disease in women. New England Journal of Medicine 337, 1491-1499. You mean, the relative risk for CHD after controlling for intake of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and trans-unsaturated fats? I thought this was odd, but it looks like you're right. The relative risk of CHD in the highest quintile of saturated fat consumption was only 1.07 times as high the risk of CHD in the lowest quintile, and since the confidence interval does not exclude 1, there is no statistical difference. Interesting! Conversely, the intake of trans-fat does seem to have an independent effect on CHD risk, even afte correcting for intake of monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, and trans-unsaturated fats. The highest quintile of consumption had a relative risk of CHD 1.53 times that of the lowest quintile, and the confidence interval does exclude 1. Though Hu et al do state that saturated fat intake is associated with CHD risk, they point out that "The observed relation for saturated fat was much weaker than that predicted by international comparisons,1 suggesting that the international analysis is seriously confounded by other lifestyle factors.3 However, our findings are consistent with the small-to-negligible effect predicted by metabolic studies of the relation of diet and blood lipid levels." The irony is that, in Hu et al's own study, the relative risk of CHD according to sat fat intake dropped almost to nothing when controlling for other confounders, suggesting that the association between saturated fat intake and CHD may be entirely a product of confounding (which doesnt mean that saturated fat is harmless, only that, contrary to popular belief, it is not more harmful with respect to CHD than other fats). SparrowsFall, there was another paper (Mozaffarian et al, 2004) published last year in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that provides additional support for Hu et al's data. This study looked at the effect of dietary components on progression of atherosclerosis and stenosis (i.e. hardening) in a group of 235 postmenopausal women over a period of 3 years. Assessment of progression was by x-ray angiography at the beginning and the end of the study. The striking result was that polyunsaturated fat intake and high glycemic carb intake were both associated with atherosclerotic and stenotic progression, while saturated fat intake was not. Mozaffarian et al, 2004. Dietary fats, carbohydrate, and progression of coronary atherosclerosis in postmenopausal women. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 80, 11175-1184. See also the commentary by Knopp and Retzlaff: Knopp and Retzlaff, 2004. Saturated fat prevents coronary artery disease? An American paradoxAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition 80, 1102-1103. Looks like another piece of conventional dietary wisdom may bite the dust!

Hopefully I'm not offending any bagel purists, and I dont know that bagels are considered pastries, but on the rare occasion that I do eat something in the morning, a toasted french toast bagel with cool hazelnut cream cheese from Panera bread is one of my favorites. I love danishes too, cheese or fruit-filed, but never actually eat them in the morning. Fresh warm croissants with honey glaze is great for breakfast, or with a salad. I only tried scones once, and like Verjuice described, it really did have the texture of sawdust. It scared me away from scones, so I never tried them again.

I'll say! This is my new 'go to' lemon dessert. For the past couple of months, I've been looking for the best way to use that lemon cream. I tried it in sweet tart shells, phyllo cups, puff pastry, but it works so, so good with the chiffon cake.

I tried the strawberry, chocolate and vanilla variations, and I liked strawberry the best by far.

Breakfast is the most important beer of the day, as they say.

I just had my first taste of the Lemon Glow Chiffon from the Cake Bible. The verdict? Its a hit. It may be my new favorite lemon cake. Its very spongy, but not so light that it disappears in your mouth. Moist, but 'durable' too. Unwimpy lemon flavor, but like I said, I doubled the zest and the juice. Its good all by itself, but I had just enough lemons left over to make another batch of Herme lemon cream (Have I mentioned in the last 5 minutes how that stuff is more addictive than crack? No? Well, it is.) Question: What do PCs do with chiffon cakes? I mean, do you typically glaze them or fill them, or do you usually leave them as is? Just trawling for ideas.

Well, obviously there are some recipes that call for specific, expensive, hard-to-find ingredients when their readily available counterparts would work just as well. But there are other recipes were 'special ingredients' really do make the dish. The trick is knowing which is which ahead of time.

Thanks, dude. And I swear, it really did taste as good as it looked!

I'm no pro, and I don't have any advice to offer, but just wanted to say that as I understand your question, the density of bread would important, because 2 breads could be of equal volume but have very different weights, depending on their density. Likewise, 2 breads of equal weight could have very different volumes, depending on density. But, 2 breads of equal volume and density would necessarily have the same weight, and 2 breads of equal weight and density would necessarily have the same volumes. So, if for some reason you wanted ten cooks to get exactly the same results, or nearly so, I guess you'd have to specify density (in grams per cubic centimer) and volume or density and weight.

Here's one. It has strawberry gelatin and strawberry puree in the batter. A lot of recipes seem to just use the strawberry gelatin, which Im sure is convenient but something just seems wrong about a strawberry cake without real strawberries. I'm looking for a good strawberry cake recipe too, so if you try this one, let us know how it turns out.

I'm trying my hand at it right now. Just got the cake in the oven. I would have made it before, but after the first two RLB recipes I tried, I was slightly disappointed and didnt look at the Cake Bible for a while. It was only after a tried a banana chiffon that it occurred to me that lemon chiffon could be just what Im looking for. So maybe the third recipe will be the charm. I used about twice as much zest, and replaced 2tb of the water with 2tb of juice. I have a feeling that if I had only used 1tb zest and 2tb juice as the recipe calls for, it wouldnt be as lemony as I'd like. I'll let you know what I think of it!

I made Kit's version last night. Its definitely the best of the 3 that I've tried. Denser than the chiffon, but not pasty like the first cake. Good flavor, thanks in part to the 8ozs of butter. I haven't iced the cake or coated it with caramel, but I think the cake would be much better if I did. You know how some cakes seem to need nothing, while others practically beg for icing or whipped cream or caramel? All the spice cakes Ive tried seem to be incomplete without that something extra. Last night it occurred to me that the best way to make spice cake would be to use that date cake recipe I used for 'sticky toffee pudding', changing the recipe only by adding cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. That cake really had everything I'm looking for in the spice cake, and it looked like a spice cake since it was colored by the date-soaking liquid.

Wendy, did you ever try the RLB lemon chiffon? If so, what did you think? It occurred to me that in my quest for the perfect lemon cake, I hadnt tried a chiffon.

Alright, here's the chiffon cake. Its extremely light and spongy, actually too light for my taste. I think I want something a little more dense. I dont think Ill make it again, but if I did, I think I'd use maybe 25% less whites. Also, for some reason the absence of butter seems more apparent in this cake than in the other two chiffon cakes Ive done.

This week I'm going to try some spice cakes. Being the idiot that I am, I made the same cake Carolyn made (I thought she had tried one of the other recipes). As I added the sugar -- at the end of the recipe-- I realized that this was the same one. Anyway . . . my cake held together a little better than Carolyn's. It is definitely a bit crumbly, but I can manage to get a slice out without reducing it to crumbs. The texture is a little pasty. The flavor is not terrible, but not too good either. Right now I have chefcyn's chiffon spice cake cooling on the rack. I have fairly high expectations, since the last two chiffon cakes Ive made --one chocolate and one banana-- have been very moist, spongy and all-around irresistable. I'll post pics soon. For now, here's a pic of the one I made last night. Kit, I'm also going to try that first recipe you posted. I have some killer caramel sauce in the fridge that would go well with it!

It would be entirely a matter of how much nitrogen you use. If you use too little, your ice cream would be too soft, if you use too much it would be too hard. There would be an optimum ratio of base to nitrogen (which I dont know).

I strained pastry cream a few times, but I stopped doing it because nothing was ever left behind in the strainer!

Maybe I dont have enough imagination, but I just cant see what's so goofy about producing great ice cream from a base in 30 seconds. In comparison, an ice cream machine looks goofy and overly laborious.

Congrats, lannie. Your panettone looks good. The other day we opened a box of Maina panettone weve hand since december. It still tastes almost as fresh as it did in december. How is that possible? How can a bread still taste so fresh months after it was made?

Are you skeptical that crystal size is related to smoothness of ice cream? Are you skeptical that crystal size is related to rapidity of freezing? Are you aware of any other method that takes your ice cream base from room temp to frozen in 30 seconds? It seems to me that there is a very obvious reason to do it apart from drama. There is an interesting article from 2002 Scientific American on this. The author recounts his experience with LN ice cream thus: Behold the smooth, sweet powers of liquid N (Liquid nitrogen ice cream! Yum!)