In order to get a sense for where to anticipate problems in pumpkin square and/or pie bakery, we must first know what a pumpkin square and/or pie actually is. Anyone? Anyone? That’s right: a custard. A very thick custard to be sure, but one that’s susceptible to all the same problems as, say a crème […]
READ ONReader and long-lost commentator Hans checks in with this comment on pumpkin-caramel bars: Ok, so what’s so cool about bars? Getting pie crust into a rectangular dish is like a round peg in a square hole. What’s so wrong with caramel pumpkin pie? (They were delicious by the way, but I’m never doing it in […]
READ ONI’m an organized fellow, but have great empathy for the organizationally-challenged among us. In fact I’m married to such a person, a college professor, a member of a demographic segment that often suffers from shocking disability in this area. Mrs. Pastry’s IQ is in the top one percent of civilized society, however where organizational acuity […]
READ ONDropping the girls off at school this morning, I was treated to a great, short read on the wall of one of the classrooms. It was a poster (really one of those giant sheets of notepaper) entitled “Things we’re thankful for on Thanksgiving”. Most of what was written there was what you might expect. “Josh […]
READ ONI’ll confess it, of all the delicious, complicated baked things there are in this wide world to eat, these simple pastries are my favorite. They are more “squares” of caramel-pumpkin pie than they are cookie-like “bars”. In pastry shops, pie squares like these are made on sheet pans (jelly roll pans), but I thought a […]
READ ONI’m including two different dough recipes. The first is the skimpier quantity I use, since it makes bars that I think have the optimum crust-to-filling ratio. However since rolling that quantity of pie dough out thin enough to cover the interior of a 10″ x 13″ baking pan can be a bit challenging (especially for […]
READ ONFor all of you who may have already bought pie pumpkins for next week and are (perhaps) wondering what to do with them, reader Mary Sue has chimed in with an outstanding idea: The only thing I’ve ever found fresh pumpkin good for is Calabaza en Tacha (pumpkin in syrup), a Mexican dish that’s typically […]
READ ON…to refresh your spices. Which is a more civilized way of saying: pitch out your old ones and buy new! I’m betting those ground cloves haven’t seen the light of day since last December. If you’ve got whole nutmeg hanging around, that’s OK, it’ll last three years. But the ground stuff isn’t reliable after three […]
READ ONIt’s an odd fact that a little bit of pre-cooking can rid a batch of canned pumpkin of any of its vaguely metallic or musty flavors. It’s something I didn’t actually believe until a couple of years ago, when I tried it for myself. Like rinsing and “steeping” canned whole tomatoes before puréeing them into […]
READ ONIn fact it’s not the sum total of the weight that Oprah’s lost following fad diets the last 25 years. It’s the weight of the 2008 world record pumpkin that was grown this year in by Thad Starr of Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Though that’s ample to say the least, it’s over 150 pounds shy of […]
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