This is another one from the request file, something else I can’t believe I’ve neglected for so long. Forgive me, all you contributors to my request post from last month, I’m skipping around a bit. I was actually planning on doing sfogliatelle this week but then realized I was fresh out of leaf lard. Time […]
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This isn’t so much a post as a request for submissions from anyone who might have experienced either one during Easter or Passover. Geek Lady made the excellent suggestion since she had a little of both over the weekend. Post-holiday posts like this might make a good tradition here on Joe Pastry, but let’s see how this one goes first. Make any submissions via the email link on the upper left and I’ll put ’em up! Feel free to include supplemental comments if desired…though keep them on the short side if you will!
READ ONI can’t remember a better Easter weekend here in Louisville. We spent a good chunk of it indoors of course, but after the last service was over yesterday morning we were free to revel in it. We threw an Easter party in the afternoon and evening as we usually do, and as per usual the attendance was heavily Spanish-speaking (note to self: learn Spanish for next year…or hire translators). Spaniards dominated, though I was delighted when two Cuban women we know walked in: a student of Mrs. Pastry’s and her 80-year-old aunt who always has stories to tell about the Cuban Revolution.
READ ONIt’s Holy Week and there’s lots to do: services to attend, prayers to say, stuff to bake, plastic eggs to fill with candy. But Easter or no, it promises to be a lovely spring weekend here in the hemisphere…I hope you have a splendid one!
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The whole thing disappeared off my platter in about 35 seconds yesterday, if you need an indication of how your friends will receive your bee sting cake. I went out to deliver a slice to a next-door neighbor and shortly two or three others emerged out of doorways and cars. They gobbled down the slices I gave them, then did the same with others that I’d intended for their spouses. “My wife needs to learn to be more social,” my neighbor Charles said through a mouthful. “Let this be a lesson to her!” What was that we were saying about drones below?
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Love that question, reader Buzz, even more than your highly creative “bee week” alias! Bee lovers have puzzled over that for millennia. How is it that such simple creatures can produce structures as architecturally complex as honeycomb, with its perfect rows of hexagonal cells? They must be geniuses, every one of them a Buckminster Fuller in miniature!
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Here are a few bee statistics for you. To make one pound of honey bees must fly 55,000 miles and visit some 2 million individual flowers. When you consider that a medium-producing hive will make about 150 pounds of honey a season, that’s a lot of activity. Eight and a quarter million miles flown and 300 million blooms. For one hive.
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I got all excited the other day when I heard that we might be having ten people over for dinner instead of six. I thought: well, why not make a really big bee sting cake out of a full recipe of brioche dough? Seemed a little risky but I decided to go for it out of curiosity. I was both alarmed and impressed when it emerged from the oven as a 16-inch-wide, 6-inch-tall behemoth.
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So I went on a shopping trip this weekend (made possible by the contributions of several dozen very generous readers). This was the result: a 7-quart KitchenAid 6500. It’s grey because I generally dig earth tones, in my clothing as well as my appliances. This is one of the largest KitchenAids in production. I’m told they make an 8-quart but I couldn’t find one of those on display anywhere. The distinguishing feature of these larger models is the lever-action bowl raiser. Smaller KitchenAids sport a tilt-head design. You can see the crank over on this side.
READ ONReader Felicia wants to know why beekeepers use smokers when they they work. Does smoke really make bees docile? The answer is no, it’s doesn’t really make them docile, Felicia, in fact it agitates them. However it agitates them in such a way that they’re disinclined to notice a beekeeper messing around in the hive. Smoke obviously makes bees think the hive is on fire. They become alarmed and do what you or I would do if we discovered our house burning: collect as many valuables as we can carry and head for the exit. Fire departments actively discourage that sort of thing of course. Hunting for treasures wastes time that’s better used for leaving.
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