Patrick S

Thanks! The sour cream lemon bundt that I made was baked in a silicone mold. I can't find any brand name on the mold, but here's what it looks like:

Tonight, the Lemon variation of the Orange Blossom Honey madelienes from Sherry Yard's The Secerets of Baking. The recipe uses equal parts of all-purpose, cake, and almond flours. These are easily overbaked, especially if you follow the times in the book. I made 2/1/2 dozen with the recipe, and I think 10-11 minutes about right. I doubled the zest to 2Tb and brushed the madeleines with warm lemon syrup when they came out of the oven. These are great.

an erratum, then : In this country, salted and unsalted butters are inherently different. ← You mean, different in ways other than salt content? For instance, is there some difference between Land-O-Lakes salted and Land-O-Lakes unsalted other than salt content?

Plant-origin whipped cream is cool whip and other non-dairy whipped stuff, which are made from vegetable oils and corn syrup.

Does anyone know how much salt on average is in salted butter, as in how many teaspoons per cup or grams per ounce?

Thanks Katie, Doc, and Josette for your compliments. I'm so pleased to be able to share these pictures with you. Suprisingly, I'm not lemoned out yet! If anything, my taste for lemon has grown now that I've found some really good ways to use it. The texture of the Garten cake is as you suspect lighter, spongier, less brickish than the CI cake, but with a lemon flavor that is even more intense. All of the cakes Ive made have been good, but I think this one will now be my default lemon cake. Next thing I want to do is get a marinade injector so I can shoot lemon syrup into the cakes. I'm also tempted to try warming some lemon cream and injecting that into the middle, making a little Uber-lemon twinkie out of the petite loaves. I don't know if that will work or not, but since I have 15 of these cakes to experiment with, it may be worth a try. Thanks Katie for suggesting limoncello. I will definitely give this a try.

I've made two more lemon cakes, one with sour cream from pastrywiz.com, and one with buttermilk from Ina Garten. The one from pastrywiz simply does not have enough lemon flavor. But then, the recipe is messed up. The ingredients call for zest, but the ingredients dont say how much. I added about 2Tb. The Ina Garten recipe I like quite a bit. I used 7 lemon's worth of zest. Its my new favorite lemon cake. I made these as petite loaves, about 3.5" long. The recipe yielded 15 cakes. I had problems getting the mini loaves unmolded. I only sprayed the molds. Next time I need to oil and flour the molds for better release. The sour cream loaf: Here's the recipe. The Ina Garten loaf: Here's the recipe.

hazardnc, This is what I had in mind. I've never used this before, so you'd be flying blind. The raspberry oil Jgarner mentioned sounds interesting too. If you end up using either, let me know how it turns out. Good luck!

That may be true of most macaroons, but I have heard of zests being used, and of course chocolate macaroons get some of their flavor from the cocoa used to make the cookies. Given a choice, Id rather have both the cookie and the filling contribute to the flavor.

Maybe you could try using a stencil to trace out heart shapes on a piece of parchment. Then flip the parchment over, and pipe out your macaroons into heart shapes. I've never done raspberry macaroons, but dried raspberry might be worth trying. For the filling, try a buttercream or pastry cream flavored with the puree of your choice. Or use a vanilla pastry cream with fresh raspberries or strawberries.

Does anyone know anything about what compounds or reaction products are formed de novo during the caramelization process? Rank speculation of course, but maybe there are compounds that have a hardening effect on finished caramel that ony form in a narrow temperature 'window,' in which case the more slowly the sugar passes through that temp window, the greater the production of these hardening compounds, and the harder the resulting caramel? Or conversely maye the longer cooking results in the destruction of 'interfering agents' (which interfere with crystallization) which would otherwise causes the sugar to take a more haphazard, less orderly structure?

Astonishing. Bravo, my good man, bravo!

So is that the secret to that perfect, puffy, domish shape?

Your madeleines look just fine. The recipe calls for zest of 1/4 lemon. I used the zest from 1/2 a largish lemon, and though the lemon flavor was subtle, it was definitely there. For the first few seconds only the chocolate is apparent, and then the lemon flavor creeps up. It just occured to me these things would be great dipped in hot chocolate. . .

Those look awesome -- puffy, smooth, perfect! Definitely some of the best Ive seen anywhere. Did you do anything special with your whites? Did you leave 'em on the counter overnight or something?

Just leave out the meringue. I dont particularly like or dislike it myself. The cake is lemony, but not intensely so. Much less intense than the pound cake for instance. If I were to make it again I would either add a little more zest and/or juice, or glaze with lemon syrup. But then my tastebuds have been spoiled lately and I like more intense flavor to begin with.

I agree with both chiantiglace and josette in the sense that these books are not the ones to appeal to your subtlest sensibilities or surprise you with novel combinations. But Marcel's stuff is not at all about subtlety or novelty -- its about unsubtle chocolate overload. If this appeals to you (as it does to me sometimes, but not to other people), I say go ahead and get a used copy. Its really all about what you want.

Wendy or Carolyn, have either or you ever prepared Marcel's Ms. D's 'She Ain't Heavy' Chocolate Cake? I ask because I'm still looking for that perfect 'traditional' chocolate cake (i.e. an iced layer cake made with flour), and Marcel so modestly describes it in his book (I'm paraphrasing) as the most delicious chocolate cake imaginable. This recipe has more butter (3/4 and 5/4lb in the cake and icing, respectively) than any similar cake I've made.

Tonight I made Herme's Ligurian Lemon Cake. Well, actually I suppose its not a Ligurian cake as I did not use Ligurian olive oil (just a cheap mild olive oil), and I omitted the raspberries because I cant stand raspberry seeds. The cake is easy to make, moist and delicious. I'll be making it again. However, I have a great idea for next time, which is to cut the cake in two (or make two cakes) and put a disc of lemon cream in the middle (as in the recipe for the Riviera).

I plan on making this very soon. The picture of the cake in the book looks nice. I might have to omit the raspberries though. I love raspberry flavor but hate raspberry seeds.

I don't have that book, but I have tried several recipes from Desaulnier's Celebrate with Chocolate that turned out not-too-bad. I made the citrus bars with white 'chocolate' icing (very good), domino cakes (decent, not spectacular), and peanut butter and jelly sandwich cookies (something whimsical for the kiddies). The good news is a zillion copies of these books have been sold, so you can pick up a used copy for next to nothing. You can get a used copy of DBC for $8.38 on Amazon, for instance. EDIT to fix pics.

If your store has it, it would be in the baking section near the corn starch. You can use corn starch if you can't find potato starch.

Josette -- the combination of lemon and ginger sounds very interesting. I definitely want to try this at some point. Sandra -- I guess I'm lucky because I have plenty of help with eating lemon desserts in my house. My daughter in particular loves lemon. She's very picky about food in general, but loves lemon so much that she always asks for the lemon out of my tea so that she can sprinkle sugar on it and suck the juice out. Redsugar - thanks for the mousseline and tart-filling recipes. The lemon pound cake you describe sounds like something truly out of the ordinary and delicious. Now I'm curious to try seperating the whites and beating them before folding them into the batter. Tonight I put together the lemon tart from Greenspan's Desserts by Pierre Herme. This is Herme's lemon cream in a sweet tart shell covered with a citrus flavored glaze. The glaze is made with sugar, water, Oetker's clear glaze, half a vanilla bean, a Tb of lemon juice, and zest strips from 1/2 an orange and 1/2 a lemon (which are steeped in the glaze and then strained out). The recipe calls for mint leaves, but I couldn't find any so I omitted them.

Thanks for the pictures and report Michelle. It looks wonderful.

Josette, I just used the Herme recipe but made up for the missing cocoa by using a little more almond meal. I colored both the strawberry and the lemon variety with a few drops of gel color. For whatever reason, these changes had the effect of making the macaroons more fragile, so I had to spend a lot of time removing them from the parchment. Thats why I'm wanting to try some other recipes, like the one jgarner posted.