Discount dropper?
Reader Jordan wrote in to point out that these droppers have hit the market in recent years. I’ve never tried one, but for fifteen bucks, can you go wrong?
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Cake Doughnut Troubleshooting
Cake doughnuts, especially when they’re made from scratch, are extremely fussy things. I can’t emphasize enough how important temperature is to getting them just right. The most common problem with cake doughnuts is an too-high batter temperature. When the temperature of the batter goes up (usually because the temperature of the room goes up) the […]
READ ONCake Doughnut Recipe
So here it is: one of my top secret recipes. Cake doughnuts are a batter, not a dough. In professional shops, they’re made by a machine that drops ring-shaped quantities of batter into a vat of hot oil. They look like this, or if you have a bigger operation, like this. These so-called doughnut “depositors” […]
READ ONHere’s the problem I have with the Wakefield story…
According to legend, Mrs. Wakefield was making her favorite classic cookie, the “Butter Drop Do” when fate intervened and the Toll House Crunch was invented. So the story goes, she normally put Baker’s chocolate in her Butter Drop Do’s, which, so the tale would have us believe, melted completely into the batter during baking. This […]
READ ONHistory of the Chocolate Chip Cookie
This is one small corner of food history where everybody tells pretty much the same story (which is actually quite refreshing). It goes like this: the chocolate chip cookie was invented by Ruth Wakefield, who, along with her husband, owned an historic establishment called the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusettes. A studied cook and […]
READ ONCake-style génoise
This simple little cake isn’t the best use of génoise, as génoise technically isn’t designed to be eaten in stacked layers, but among other layers of mousse or fruit filling (e.g. in a gâteau-style pastry). Still, we do what we have time for, eh? (And actually, now that I think about it, this “simple little […]
READ ONHow to Make a Jelly Roll
You can call it a Swiss roll, if you like. Or a jam roll (which is more precise, since you don’t see to many recipes for these that call for fruit jelly anymore). This one has some real fruit added in, which makes it a little more distinctive. Jelly rolls are, and always have been, […]
READ ONYes, yes…enough of your amphiphiles!
Why is it that every time I mention egg yolks I hear from VERY regular commentator Mexico Bob? He writes in to (re)remind me: Don’t forget that egg yokes contain lecithin which is a natural amphiphile which is one of the building blocks of life. In fact the word “lecithin” is Greek for “egg yolk”. […]
READ ONTroubleshooting the Jelly Roll
Or jam roll, really, since that’s what most people roll up in their génoise sheets. The big problem they have, of course, is cracking. But let’s face it, cake isn’t really designed to withstand the stresses that come into play when you wrap it up into a curlicue. Structures made of cooked starch and/or egg […]
READ ONHow to Make Yellow Cake Layers
This butter cake is made via the “one bowl” or “reverse creaming” method which delivers a very moist and tender layer indeed. If you’re on the hunt not for a box-mix-style cake (that would be one of the “high ratio” cake layer recipes in the cake layer section) but rather a classic old-school yellow cake […]
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