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 ONI’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 ONIt 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 ONHere’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 ONReader 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 ONAnna 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 […]
READ ONMaking the many pronouncements that I do (what can I say, it’s my nature), I frequently forget the increasingly international readership of joepastry.com. Clair writes in from France (Normandy, no less) to correct me about butter: In your buttermilk post, you say that “…butter isn’t made out of cream anymore. It’s made from leftovers from […]
READ ONHave to run up to Chicago on business later this morning, so this will probably be it for me for the week. I shall return, hopefully with much-needed work, but also with a full cooler of encased meats. Vienna Beef, here I come!
READ ONI’ve written about every other component of my panna cotta, a reader pointed out last night, can I write a little about buttermilk? Oh, but of course. For while there may or may not be much real cream around anymore, there definitely isn’t any real buttermilk. Why not? Because buttermilk is the fluid that remains […]
READ ONExceedingly simple, just the way I like it. Feels like it’s been an awfully long time coming, though, doesn’t it? First, let me thank several very talented pastry people who all wrote in with various tips on this dessert. They were all very much appreciated (though to be 100% honest, I went back to my […]
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