cakewalk

Just found this on a forum via Google (community/cookinglight.com): "Nutmeg will last 20 years in the shell and 3 years out of the shell. NO one has mentioned that you do need to crack the outer hard shell off the nutmeg and grate the inner smaller portion. thanks for tips on the nutmeg grater from WS. i always wanted one of them , but i'll stick to my little tiny grater for now. hope this helps......" I see FauxPas just posted about that. And I just went and cracked open my nutmeg with a nutcracker, worked in a second. So now I have to go bake something with nutmeg in it.

When my sister came back from vacation a few years ago (I forget where she was, I think Aruba), she brought some spices for me. Among them was nutmeg, and they were like the shiny ones on the bottom of your photo. I still have them somewhere. I found that I couldn't do anything with them, even the microplane couldn't create a dent in that shell. I thought it was strange, because the shelled nutmegs are not really much larger than the unshelled, but obviously that shell is very strong. I'm wondering if it will destroy my blender, but I don't think I want to find out. If you figure out what to do with them, let us know! Maybe I will start playing around with it again. A hammer might work!

A thing of beauty that is, Patrick. Well worth waiting for. Did you hang it upside down? Did it "behave" as you expected?

Nice recipe, Patrick. The honey instead of sugar is interesting, I'm sure it will give a great flavor but I'm wondering how it might change texture. Looking forward to your results. (BTW - I bought some paper molds, too. But that's as far as I got!)

Just FYI: http://www.weekendbakery.com/posts/the-panettone-project/ I haven't read through it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

Beautiful stuff up there. I'm also impressed with those PB cookies put through a press, they look great. I made a lot of cookies, but didn't take any photos. But the best ones were from a recipe I've been meaning to try for ages. It's a Maida Heatter recipe that appears in the Craig Claiborne NY Times Cookbook, ginger cookies with chocolate filling. They looked sort of like a Milano cookie, but the cookie was heavily ginger flavored. (I upped the amount of ginger she called for.) With the dark chocolate filling, it was especially good. Also made Linzer cookies, chocolate chips, maple pecan cookies, sugar cookies, and a couple of others but I can't remember already! (I did not make panettone - did anybody? - but I'm still planning to.) Also had a dismal failure with a Carole Walters recipe, and I still say that the failure was the recipe, not the execution. I was tempted to start a new thread called "Duds" or something like that. Is there one already? For failed recipes where you know you're not the one who messed up. People can either be forewarned, or commiserate with one another.

Oh, cdh, I think you're very kind, but the heavy-hitting marketing campaign leads me to believe otherwise. I think they intended to capitalize on a gullible market. This is nothing new in the business world, I guess. Looks like people who work seriously with chocolate decided they were getting away with too much. It seems that they're still trying to cover up mediocre chocolate with fancy wrappers and beards and suspenders and stuff. I know that sounds mean, but every step they've taken seems so disingenuous.

A while ago I passed by this fruit stand and they had the most beautiful oranges. Deep orange, a bit heavy, really beautiful. I couldn't resist, and bought three. (For a buck apiece.) They were the worst oranges ever! I wanted to juice them and then microplane the rind. I forget what I was making. I got maybe a teaspoon of juice from each orange, if that much, and the rind was so bitter. I ended up throwing them out and I bought oranges at the corner store, which were okay. What I don't understand is this: it takes a lot of work and money to grow bad oranges. You still have to plant the trees and water them, you still have to hire workers to work the fields, they still need to be shipped to wherever they're going. Why waste all the energy, effort, money, etc. to grow bad produce? I don't get it.

Hmmm. You probably could have put the lumpy mess into a 9x13-inch pan, smoothed it out, baked it and then sliced bar cookies from it. (But I don't suppose you want to try it again.)

I bake, therefore I'm a bit on the OCD side of things. I find scoops too messy. Batter sticks to the scoop, which annoys me. The cookies are often visibly different in size, which REALLY annoys me! (Although yours are very uniform, and very impressive.) It's all about creating your method. When I weigh, I put a piece of wax paper on the scale. Let's say each cookie should be 30 grams. I pick up some dough, plunk it on the wax paper. After you do this for a while, your eye knows what 30 grams looks like and your fingers know what 30 grams feels like. I put as many 30-gram blobs of cookie dough on the wax paper as will fit. I watch the weight indicator: 30 gr, then another blob and it's 60 gr, another blob and it's 90 gr, etc. (Or you could hit tare in between, but I usually don't.) If a blob is a bit over or under, I take off or add some dough to it. Then they're transferred to the baking sheet, and you continue weighing out the rest. Then you methodically go to stage two - roll the blobs into balls, or flatten with a glass, or whatever. I know it seems like more steps (it is more steps), but I have always found it to go much more quickly than using a scoop. (Maybe I'm just scoop challenged.)

I also weigh, and I prefer grams. (More precise.) But I also find weighing to be easier and faster. I guess everyone works out his own method.

Thanks Melissa. That cheese cracker recipe is interesting, it contains both baker's ammonia and yeast. I wonder if I can make them using finely grated cheese rather than the cheese powder it calls for. (What is cheese powder anyway?) Those chocolate cookies I guess are the "flip side" of KAF's Vanilla Dreams, one of my favorite cookies. Great crunch, because of the baker's ammonia. Chocolate flavored vanilla dreams, what could be bad?

The cookie bug is really starting to bite, and this afternoon I was looking through the "Cookies and Crackers" book from the Time Life series. They have a recipe for "Fruited Cornmeal Cookies" (Zaletti), that I'm dying to try. I've tried a few zaletti recipes that I thought were okay, but nothing to write home about. But this recipe looks very different, mostly because it calls for baker's ammonia, one of my favorite things. There is nothing that gives cookies the crunch of baker's ammonia, I just love it. I also love anything with cornmeal. So this is a match made in heaven. I think I'll do a test run this weekend. A while ago I found a great blog, https://londoneats.wordpress.com/tag/bakers-ammonia/ - it seems he starts posting cookie recipes shortly before Christmas every year. Hopefully he's getting ready for this year. And he loves baker's ammonia, so there are quite a few recipes including this ingredient. I've never tried subbing baker's ammonia in cookies that call for baking powder or soda. Has anyone ever done that?

This does get interesting. You're probably aware of this, but if you make tempura (or whatever) - are you going to be actively cooking for your guests on Shabbat? If so, I think it's well outside the realm of any type of Orthodoxy. (Not that there's anything wrong with that ...) Keep posting, I'd like to hear about what you decide and how it goes over.

That's interesting, gulfporter, never heard of that one before! I'd venture to guess that at that level of kashrut, the people wouldn't eat on his dishes/utensils at all, no matter what was served. But you're right, he should probably run some ideas by them first.

Nice ideas. I don't know how religious your guests are (keeping kosher is not monochromatic), but I'm guessing they're modern Orthodox and there is some leeway. (Because they're eating at your place, and I'm assuming your utensils are not kosher.) They might want to steer clear of anything that is derived from grapes. The balsamic suggestion in the above post made me think of this. I don't want to get into the details, but wine and grape derivatives have rules of their own. Speaking of which, were you planning to serve wine? Again, I don't know where these people are on the spectrum of kosher observance, but these are things you might want to consider. (New Zealand does make some very nice kosher wines.)

That's a very interesting set-up. Not sure a group of Orthodox Jews will really be concerned about the festivity level for Christmas. It's not exactly a Jewish holiday! Anyway, comments above are correct. No shellfish. (Fish must have fins and scales to be kosher. So no catfish, either.) There's no prohibition against mixing fish and dairy. (Meat and dairy cannot be combined.) You can make gefilte fish for a tongue-in-cheek gesture. Or Moroccan fish balls, which is an old Jewish-Sephardi dish. But they also might appreciate something new, something that you'd serve regularly as a starter in New Zealand that they haven't tried before. (But have something for back-up. Salmon always works.) Good luck. Edited to ask: where is the group from?

I remember somebody else said it worked like a dream, I just don't know who. There must be another thread on cabbage. I have a huge one in the fridge right now, not sure I have a pot that will contain it, so I had also been thinking about freezing. (But I'll have to empty the freezer first.)

Don't know if it will go with your TG feast, but this is one of my favorite sweet potato recipies, been making it for a long time. I think it was someone on eGullet that first made mention of it many moons ago: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/lime-cilantro-sweet-potatoes-109459

I much prefer comments, but I can't say I discount ratings entirely. The ratings (and comments) for the eGullet recipes would come from membership only? If so, I think that makes it very different from what we find on most other forums. If I'm reading through ratings and comments for recipes, I'm always more interested in the lowest ratings. I want to know what the problem is. If it's silly (they substituted ingrendients or methods on a whim), I can just ignore it. But often it's a thoughtful critique, and it's the low rating that called my attention to it in the first place. It's not necessarily informative to go through pages of five-star ratings where everyone says, "this is the best recipe I've ever made in my life!!!!"

I love fresh cranberries. Yesterday I made cranberry chutney from a recipe I found on-line years ago. During the week I'll try the one above, it's spiced quite differently. Looks lovely. There's nothing quite like that color.

Couldn't you make a paste out of everything but omit the garlic, storing it for long periods? Then when you want to use it (or several hours before), mix the garlic into it. That might work.

http://www.sfgate.com/food/article/Emperor-of-panettone-Gary-Rulli-ramps-up-for-5937973.php#photo-7232726 Great photos and video.

Beautiful. I never heard of two-stranded before. Very lovely. And lovely color.

Thanks for those links Patrick, I never saw that thread before. (Your panettone is certainly not pitiful!) A few years ago joepastry.com made panettone, and I followed along with him. (I like his blog a lot.) He used the Peter Reinhart recipe, but I strayed. I ended up combining Peter Reinhart's recipe and Sherry Yard's recipe. I don't remember what I took from each one, and the result was okay, but it wasn't much more than okay. I often get into trouble by combining elements from various recipes. They don't always work in combination, and I'm not always sure why. Using parts of different recipes really can't be done so haphazardly, especially in baking. I was reading about panettone the other day, and came across a recipe that hung it upside down on skewers after baking. I had never seen this before, but people did mention it in the thread you linked to. I was a bit horrified at this idea, thinking that the bread would be torn apart and fall right off the skewers. But I guess not. Anyway, I'm more than game to participate in this cook-off, but don't have the knowledge (or the camera!) to lead it. If you can do it, I suspect you might have a lot of interested participants.