Tri2Cook

They're available locally but I haven't been brave enough to try to tackle one. Maybe I jumped the gun a little with my "no such thing as too much" comment... those things are ridiculously large.

Nope. I usually buy the deep dish version ("usually" being relative, I don't buy any candy very often). I don't know if they're any bigger around than the regular ones (if so it's not by much) but they're at least twice as tall. And it's pretty much all filling providing the extra. There's no such thing as too much peanut butter.

All of those old challenges were so inspirational and really did push the creativity. I was a little bit late to the party for the pastry challenge here but there were several out there in virtual land that I took part in regularly. You already know that because you took part in most of the same ones. The major difference being, they just sustained me. Inspired me to do things outside of what I could at work and have fun. They ignited you and you went off like a rocket. Now you're about to hit the target you've been aimed at for a long time and it's awesome to see.

That looks pretty amazing already. Really happy to see all of this coming together for you, you've certainly put the work in.

Yeah, the fuzzy is somewhat of a "don't mess with it more than you have to" technique. It is pretty easy to brush off or smash with warm fingers. I imagine trying to move something that large and heavy without destroying a lot of the effect would be a fun challenge...

I'm in the same boat as far as it having been a while since I've done it but I did a lot of experimenting with temps and chocolate/CB ratios at one point. The effect is definitely at it's best with frozen items. It works on non-frozen items but the effect diminishes as the temp goes up. Refrigerated items do ok, room temp items tend to just have a matte finish with not much fuzzy look. Of course, that probably is effected by room temp... something I didn't have a large degree of control over where I was working at that time.

That's a huge bunny!

I can't believe I'm about to say this because I generally tend to be a picky basta… err... fella, with my work but... personally, I'd probably just take a fine paint brush and some well-thinned melted chocolate and paint along the cracks then say "here you go Lady's Auxiliary" and watch them be thrilled.

Vile would be an upgrade to what I think of those things...

And it was originally supposed to be M&Ms but Mars Inc. wouldn't allow them to use them in the movie so they went to Hershey and asked to use Reese's Pieces instead... I'm guessing the guy at Mars that made that call was probably mopping the bathrooms a few weeks later.

I like cottage cheese, I can eat it straight out of the container and be happy. Don't even have a favorite brand, just whatever I happen to grab or whatever is on sale. But I've had cottage cheese in lasagna more than enough times to know that I'm gonna have to disagree with America's Test Kitchen on that one. Ricotta works out to almost double the price of cottage where I live and I consider it money well spent when I make lasagna.

I think so too. I spent a lot of time doing exactly that in an earlier stage of my cooking career. I didn't say they shouldn't do it, I just said I won't be doing it. Me too. I can do the same with the Sistine Chapel... but my ceiling's not going to look like that anytime soon.

If so, I applaud their dedication... because there's no way I'm hand-scraping that much design into each individual chocolate. It'd take me 2 days and a whole lot of bad words to do one mold.

That's fair, I can definitely see how that would give someone a negative feeling towards cottage cheese even if the intentions were good. But I honestly would be very surprised if that's a common enough thing to be a significant barrier to cottage cheese sales, which is what the article was getting at. At least, I hope it's not.

Why would a product having an association with dieting cause anger in a person who is or was overweight? Does the overweight person think "nope, don't want anybody to see me eating that and think I'm trying to lose some weight"? Does a person who isn't overweight think "nope, don't want anybody to see me eating that and think I'm fat"? I'm not trying to be nasty here, I just really don't understand the anger. I assumed the thing in the article that talked about a negative association to diet foods was referring to the line of thinking some people have where they automatically say "yuck" any time you tell them something is healthy or low fat or low sugar or anything along that line.

I want to try making that one of these days... if I ever manage to win the battle with what seems to be a complete inability to successfully make a good batch of kimchi. I've tried all kinds of recipes, used all kinds of tips and tricks I managed to dig up here and on google in general... kimchi continues to stick it's tongue out at me and laugh. It always tastes fine but not as kimchi, more as a kimchi-esque salad. It just won't properly ferment.

I may have to give them a try anyway. I'm thinking half and half salted and unsalted nuts. The nutty, sweet and salty combination is the reason I still buy Payday bars when I can find them. I'd probably scatter the salted nuts on the base and then pour the topping with the unsalted nuts over it just to try to keep as much of the salt as possible on the nuts instead of dissolved into the syrup.

I put the end result in the dinner thread... seemed more appropriate since it wasn't really what this thread is about in the end.

St. Patrick's Day corned beef, cabbage and potatoes... with a twist. Corned beef burger with smoked cheddar, lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, garlic dill pickles, dijon mustard and mayo. Crispy smashed potatoes and a mustard-based hot slaw.

But rutabagas are what all good turnips want to grow up to be.

It's pretty much the only canned tuna I buy now, the tuna with Thai chiles. I don't buy canned tuna often but every now and then I get in the mood for a sandwich and that's the tuna I grab. Expensive little cans (relative to some of the other tunas) where I live but, like you mentioned in another post, it's not an every day item so I don't really worry about the extra cost at that end of the scale. It's not like the cost difference between a Ferrari and a Schwinn.

Then I personally wouldn't change a thing in that area. It looks like a normal cake texture in their photo, is it possible you underbaked it a bit? An easy fix, add more sugar. You can get a good general idea of how sweet the result will be by tasting the batter. Although, 1 cup sugar to 1 1/2 cups flour doesn't seem particularly low to me so I'm not sure what you mean by "lack of sugar"... unless you overlooked the 1 cup of sugar in the cake part of the recipe and are wondering why a cake wouldn't have sugar. Got nothing for that one other than try something more ripe. It's a banana upside down cake, try working some really ripe mashed bananas into the batter if the plain cake is too bland for your taste. Are you comparing it to pineapple upside-down cake? Because pineapple will release much more liquid than the bananas will. You could increase the amount of topping, 1 1/2 - 2x the amount of butter and brown sugar called for. That might help with your sweetness issue as well. A syrup always works for adding moisture to cakes after baking so your idea to do that would work too.

A few months ago, I cured beef chuck in the Ruhlman 5% brine, cooked it sous vide to get it nice and tender and tucked it away in the freezer. I took it out of the freezer yesterday before work. Today, I cut it into cubes and ran it through my meat grinder. The non-traditional twist on St. Patrick's Day dinner has begun. And the final mix... 2 lbs ground corned beef, 2 lbs fresh ground chuck, 6 oz grated butter and some black pepper.

I generally use unsweetened shredded coconut for most things. The one available where I live is called "medium shred" but it's fairly small and would easily be made smaller by a trip through a processor.

Definitely going to have to give it a try then. I wasn't hopeful about being able to actually pipe it so that's awesome even if I do have to grind the coconut a bit.