Actually, I didn’t intend to take one, but I’m being called out of town on business the next two days. Combine that with a short week and the result is pretty much a wipeout. And now that I think about it, I’m pretty much wiped out myself. Back on Monday with more cockamamie ideas!
READ ONNow is the time to make and bake your loaves. This way, they’ll have plenty of time to mellow by the end of the year. Three or four months does wonders for a nice, sweet, whiskey-soaked fruitcake. What, don’t believe me? Try it. You’ll never eat a fresh-baked fruitcake again!
READ ONSince jelly doughnuts have been the topic the last many days, it only seems fitting that I re-post this recipe, for leftover jelly doughnut bread pudding. I know, I know, “over the top” doesn’t begin to describe a preparation like this…heavy cream plus sugar plus egg yolks plus jelly doughnuts…my blood pressure goes up just […]
READ ONA post by a particularly influential StumbleUpon member pushed my daily page views through the roof over the weekend. Saturday, a touch over 20,000 people stopped by the site, nearly 54,000 in total for the three-day weekend (which, if memory serves, is more than the total circulation of the The New York Times these days). […]
READ ONAnd if they happen to be filled with jam, so much the better! Homemade yeast doughnuts are so light they practically float on air, which makes it possible for me to inhale about half a dozen on a good day. Don’t try that at home, kids. I’m a professional. Good yeast doughnuts start with a […]
READ ONOnce upon a time, superfine sugar was a fixture of the sweetener section of every grocery store. That’s before the shelves came to be crowded with a.) dozens of artificial sweetener products and b.) dozens of “natural” and “raw” sugar products. Between the forward-looking diet crowd and the backward-looking natural foods crowd, a pastry baker […]
READ ONA few emails have come in about that, and the answer is yes. You can bake yeast doughnuts in a hot oven, but I’ll tell you now that a baked doughnut is not even close to the same experience as a fried doughnut. I strongly advise against it. The great misconception about frying is that […]
READ ONThere are two schools of thought on filling jelly doughnuts. Purists (often Austrians, who enjoy small and delicate krapfen during waltz season) frequently claim that the only proper way to fill a jelly doughnut is before frying. How does one do that? The answer: by cutting a thin round of dough, laying a spoonful of […]
READ ONTrained pastry chefs are taught elaborate techniques for fashioning pastry bags out of folded paper. I admire that, but I also have things to do and places to go. So when I need to do a little piping, say of jam into a doughnut, I go the pre-fab route. The basic components, tips and couplers, […]
READ ONFor many people the word Berliner conjures up images of JFK’s famous gaffe by the Berlin wall in 1963, where, intending to say “I am a resident of Berlin” (Ich bin ein Berliner) he actually said “I am a jelly doughnut”. The quote goes like this: All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens […]
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