Mistakes have been made, someone will be blamed.
It’s been pointed out that I’m a typographical error machine this week. What can I say, my proof-reading department is woefully underpaid. You RSS readers get the worst of it, since I can change the posts themselves when I see (or am informed of) a typo, but can’t do anything about what’s already in your […]
READ ONDawn of the Modern Cake
When last we left cake (yesterday) it was the Middle Ages, and cakes were not terribly different from what we know today as fruitcakes, heavy with ingredients, but leavened with yeast. This began to change in the 1700’s, which, as some of you regular readers may remember, is the period we know at joepastry.com as […]
READ ONWho were the first to make cake?
If by that you mean not just a round, flat thing that’s edible, but a sweetened and/or enriched bread, then there is some traceable history there. The Egyptians were known to make good cake, handy as they were with yeast, and wont to add things like honey to their breads. According to ancient records the […]
READ ONSpeaking of the shape of cake…
Check the “cake” entry in the closest convenient food reference, and you’re almost certain to find some ink (or pixels) devoted to pre-Christian societies and round ceremonial cakes. The operative thought being that the shape of cake evolved as a result of pagan ideas about roundness, the sun, moon, time and the phases of life. […]
READ ONSo…cake
I’ve been afraid of this whole cake topic since I started this blog, since cake, like pie, is a rather difficult item to classify. But a grown man shouldn’t tremble before a pastry. It’s unseemly. We can start, as so many food writers do, with the word itself. Perhaps there are clues there, yes? The […]
READ ONRequest #3: Cake
It was pointed out to me very recently that while I have some tutorials up about preparing cake layer pans and assembling a layer cake, I have nothing up about making the layers themselves. Quite a silly omission, and one I’m only too happy to fix. I have a cake to make this week anyway, […]
READ ONAdventures in Butter Making
Here’s an ingenious method for making one’s own Euro-style cultured butter, sent in by reader Jessie. It calls for locally-obtained, non-stabilized cream, but outside places like Wisconsin or Vermont, that stuff ain’t too easy to come by. Freshest is best, though the recipe will still work with store bought cream (despite what the directions say […]
READ ONOn which note…
Reader Sasha writes in with this question: Okay, this drives me crazy. Cook’s Illustrated swears by their panels of tasters that there is no discernible difference between imitation vanilla extract and genuine vanilla extract. And I just find that hard, if not impossible, to swallow, er, believe. I’ve also found there’s a huge difference in […]
READ ONWhere to find vanilla beans
Anna over at Life’s Too Short for Mediocre Chocolate offers up this piece of advice for people looking for vanilla beans: I forgot to mention, if you have Costco where you live, you can get a pack of 2 vials of vanilla beans for about 7 bucks, and they each have three or four beans […]
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