Prepare ye!
Avast there, for International Talk Like a Pirate Day be approaching! This Saturday, the 19th of September it be. Don’t forget, ye scurvy dogs, or I’ll keel haul the lot of ye!
READ ONApplying ze icing base coat
Once your cookies are baked and cooled, it’s time to get your icings together. The first step in cookie decorating is applying your base coats of icing. These will be the canvases upon which you shall create your edible masterpieces. They can of course be any color at all. Since I’ve got an autumn thing […]
READ ONBorlaug Revisited
Nice article in the Wall Street Journal today on Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Defused the “Population Bomb”. Access it here: http://tinyurl.com/nhh32h. There’s a lot to like in the piece, even if the Journal was — ehem — a little slow out of the chute on this one. Gregg Easterbrook does a nice job of […]
READ ONMaking and Baking Iced Cookies
This is pretty by-the-numbers stuff, however this dough is quite soft, so a little extra tenderness is required. Begin by placing your dry ingredients in a mixer bowl (you can make this recipe by hand if you wish) and stir them to combine, about 30 seconds. When the dry ingredients are mixed, begin to add […]
READ ONIced Cookie Recipe
Most decorated cookies — essentially just butter cookies — suffer from one of two basic problems. Either they’re so tender that they crumble as they’re being decorated, or they’re so tough they’re barely edible. A happy medium must therefore be found, for holiday and/or special occasion cookies need to look good AND taste good. This […]
READ ONRequest #13: Decorative Cookies
I’ve received so many requests for decorative, iced holiday cookies over the last two years or so, I can scarcely count them. I’ve put them off because I’m simply not much of a decorator. But the request list is the request list. Here goes!
READ ONOh no, I’m not going anywhere.
Reader Cathy wrote in over the weekend, apparently concerned that my reference to being “wiped out” last week meant I was tiring of blogging in general. By no means. Someday, of course, joepastry.com will come to an end, and I’ll vanish in a cloud of cocoa powder and typographical errors. But not today…and no time […]
READ ONCheese and Fruitcake?
Honestly, it’s never occurred to me to combine the two. However judging from some of the emails I’ve received over the last week, I may be in the minority. Reader Bronwyn (from New Zealand) writes: I must say, “heated with big slabs of cream cheese on top” seems a very odd way to eat Christmas […]
READ ONNorman, we hardly knew ye.
This weekend the world, very quietly, lost its greatest humanitarian. And I mean that literally. Superlatives like “greatest humanitarian” come cheap nowadays. Heck someone probably used the term on the podium at the MTV Awards last night. However I’m pretty sure no one in attendance there had really saved more lives than any human being […]
READ ONMy Fruitcake Hero
Jennifer over at Pastry Methods and Techniques (link to the right) writes: My husband just began his fruitcake baking extravaganza on Sunday–the first two loaves are aging in the closet, getting sprayed with brandy every few days. He’ll bake anywhere between 2-6 for the next several weekends and give them out as Christmas gifts. He […]
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