Lisa Shock

Sourdough starter is a fermented liquid composed of just flour and water. It's easier to make with organic flour, as that will contain some wild yeast as well as beneficial bacteria. HERE's a pretty good tutorial. Making real yeast is a tricky business, I have only done it once. It requires a lot of hops, and once made only keeps for about a week under refrigeration.

You can grab the peels with tongs and stablize them on a cutting board with a second pair of tongs, or salad server tongs. Those silicon oven mitts are useful here as well. (easy to keep super-clean, unlike a cloth oven mitt)

The gumpaste in a tub (powder) is perfectly good, IMO.

There's a good chance that they are unmarked because they were painted as a hobby by a relative. There are still paint your own pottery places today, but, the hobby was huge in the early 1900s.

I'd use gum paste for the ruffles, attached to a fondant cake covering. I looked at a bunch of youtube videos and most use gumpaste or a mix of gumpaste and fondant. IIRC, fondant alone tends to need to be thick and heavy -it always going to be a bit droopy as ruffles. Check out fondant roses vs gum past roses. I know that fondant is Charm City cakes' signature 'look' but, I don't think fondant will look like real fabric ruffles. HERE's a gum paste tutorial. HERE's a fondant tutorial. Notice how the gum paste edges are very fine and airy, and the fondant ones are cracked, thick and droopy. On the other hand, most civilians would never notice a difference. That said, I have learned that one never knows who will show up and see your work.

I would be wary of freezing it. Instead, I would try to find friends and neighbors to share it with. -If it's that cheap, and readily available all the time. I belong to a FaceBook group of home gardeners who trade with each other for all sorts of things, not all of them from the garden.

Yeah, I kid you not, it's like $3.29 a bag at Costco. Heck, I could buy one at costco and ship it to you for less than that. Still, for what the shipping cost, you could have another 2 bags or so.

I'd look at weighing the dry ingredients, like your flour, for more consistent results. You can purchase a really big bag of yeast for about $3-$4 (it's been a while since I bought a bag) at Costco or Smart & Final or Restaurant Depot. I buy one every couple of years and pour the yeast into a canning jar which I vacuum seal and keep in the fridge. You don't have to refrigerate it, but, I live in AZ and sometimes the house can get very warm if we have a power failure in the summer. Active dry yeast has large granules, Instant yeast has a much finer texture. Active dry needs to be 'bloomed' in water, yes bloom is the word you are looking for, instant yeast can just be mixed in with the flour straight into the mixer, no extra steps. Instant is the choice of many bakeries due to the ease of use. There's also a less common type, called osmotolerant, for use in sweet doughs as sugar is hygroscopic and in large amounts can affect yeast performance by drying it out too much. I recommend Ciril Hitz's books, his formulas always come out just right for me. (his website has corrections for his books on it) Welcome to eG, happy baking!

Looks like some sort of lime to me. Most limes, when really ripe, turn partially yellow. -Not as yellow as a lemon, but, yellow enough that people often can't figure out what sort of tree they have in their yard here in Arizona.

What temperature was the dough held at? Did you proof it? It looks like the dough was too cold when it went into the oven. Longer shaping to build structure would have helped as well. This doesn't really look like rope, but, I will ask anyway. Were the insides sticky, and was there an odd melony smell?

Potato chips would be tasty, at least for me. Also roasting the potatoes in olive oil with a good dose of kosher salt and maybe some rosemary would also be good. I mean, we roast other sweet-ish vegetables, like sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, etc.

If you take the time to read Kenji's article, you will see that your method encourages the whites to stick to the membrane inside the shell, and also creates the air-dimple. The article chronicles side by side testing of thousands of eggs; using the same equipment and eggs of the same age.

These types of flooring off-gas nasty chemicals like formaldehyde -for years. There are US federal guidelines for how much, but the manufacturers often ignore them. I put in ceramic tile (75¢ per sq ft tile) and love it. I have black grout. No worries about spills, fading, pet nails, etc. Doesn't need any special formula cleaners. I purchase an extra box of tile in case some broke, I haven't had to use them yet. It's been 5½ years and I am happy. You can now get tiles which look like wood planks, too.

Here is definitive information about cooking eggs in the shell and how to cook them to get them out of the shell cleanly, thanks to what must have been hundreds of hours of work by J. Kenji Lòpez-Alt. I just made some and can confirm his findings.

I would keep an eye for a DeLonghi/Kenwood. Two years ago, I saw a 7qt DeLonghi sell on eBay for $120 plus shipping. It had never been used because the owner couldn't figure out how to seat the paddle/beaters up in the motor housing.

At least add it to the 'About Me' section of your profile.

Attachments are generally not interchangeable between brands. The regular bowl will work, just make sure to get the proper size hook. The Kenwood, sold in the US for a while as Delonghi, comes in 2 sizes, 5qt and 7 qt -which is the bowl size. Each of those came with a dough hook, and you could jam either one into the hole to attach it, but the wrong one will be either too short or too long. I recommend that you find a photo of the mixer when new, with all attachments, and note the shape of the dough hook. The different sizes have slightly different shapes. You will be more confident in looking to buy a dough hook on ebay, etc.

In the end though, isn't this a variation on a gin Daisy (with muddled fruit instead of liqueur)?

Google's algorithm is a closely held secret. Supposedly, they use over 200 factors to calculate position. A few of these are known, most are not. The ones I know are: number of links from other pages the Google status of those linking pages the age of the links frequency of new content, especially on the front page keyword relevance (although this is barely used anymore, too many metadata cheaters) the url containing keywords, or not links to other pages, reciprocal ones used to be better, now not so much I have no idea how to optimize the contents of a book for this. Remember to mention eG several times....

I lived for a long time at 7,300 in New Mexico. What happens at high altitude is less about leavening and more about structure. Less air sitting on top of your pan means that baked goods over inflate, like blowing up a balloon too much, then collapse when the structure breaks. With cakes and such, the adjustment is simply less leavening, and sometimes more gluten. In this recipe, the only thing providing structure is the egg white. I suggest adding a small amount, like .5 oz at first, of powdered egg white. I know the whites aren't whipped, but, they still have many properties associated with whipping. One of those is negative reactions to fats. You might try changing cocoa brands. Some cocoa is fat free, some is very high in fat. The lower fat-content type should work better.

How old are the eggs? Old whites deflate really easily and are pretty much useless.

The wide mouth jars are sometimes just carried seasonally by some stores. At the end of the summer, they go on clearance sometimes for as much as 75% off.

I like bitter foods. I like more bitter foods than anyone I know. I'll nibble on grapefruit rinds, or eat plain radicchio sometimes. Every time I have tried cooking bitter melon, it has wound up being pretty inedible. But, I have a Japanese friend who makes it all the time, and I can eat her dishes just fine. This might have something to do with the different varieties -just like how different peppers have varying amounts of heat. Or maybe, it's just bad luck, like getting a bitter eggplant. I'd cook some and taste it before adding to a whole dish and possibly ruining the other ingredients.

Dried cranberries work well, too.

I have seen rice wine in markets here in Arizona for as little as $3 a bottle. -And that price includes import taxes, shipping costs, etc.