A flourless chocolate cake is a great time to let your inner chocolate snob shine through. Assuming you decide not to use any added sugar or flavorings, the only thing you’ll really taste in this cake is chocolate, so it makes sense to get finicky. This is one of those times the home baker has […]
READ ONThis week I have a yen for some serious chocolate. And what delivers a chocolate body blow better than a flourless chocolate cake? Great flourless cakes are made of just three things: chocolate, eggs, butter. Nothing else is needed if the chocolate is truly spectacular — and why make a cake with anything less? The […]
READ ONIt takes some moxie to move to the South and then a couple of years later start telling people how to make southern biscuits. But then who’s going to come over and blog this for me, Paula Deen? I’m going for it. Recipes for buttermilk biscuits, the archetypal chemically-leavened foodstuff, can be found everywhere. There […]
READ ONWith croissants of course. Pain au chocolat especially. Deliver a few of those and she’ll let me spend the whole weekend laying on the couch watching football. Laminated pastry may or may not have the same effect on your spouse but you won’t know until you try, will you? So here, if you’ve ever wanted […]
READ ONNobody likes fat. Either that or everybody does. It’s hard to figure out which. Really it depends on the circumstance in which you catch people, talking about it or actually eating it. In principle nobody likes fat. You hear it from nutritionally educated types all the time: Oh my family and I avoid fats wherever […]
READ ONEvery laminated dough, be it puff pastry, croissant, flaky pastry or Danish, begins its life as a thick slab of butter encased in a dough “envelope”. This 3-layer dough-butter-dough package is then flattened and folded however many times it takes to get the number of layers the maker is after. A folded flaky pastry for […]
READ ONSo, now that you know something about the process of fermentation you can probably guess what that brown liquid is that collects on top of a bread starter. Yes, that’s right, alcohol. A very impure form of alcohol, otherwise known as hooch. Sure, you can drink it, but one taste will demonstrate all too clearly […]
READ ONThose of you who are familiar with me know I love to do photo tutorials. In fact it can be argued that I do too many of them. But I figure, if the petits fours-making process doesn’t qualify for photography, what does? So here’s a step-by-step for all you petits fours makers-to-be. We begin with […]
READ ONNow there are the makings of one fine fruitcake (actually two, I cut the recipe in half). You may notice there are cranberries in there. The reason for that is I couldn’t find any figs at Kroger yesterday afternoon. I could have gone somewhere else, but I’d already spent enough time in the supermarket. The […]
READ ONYou know you’ve got hold of a good, solid traditional fruitcake recipe when the ingredients list is as long as your arm. These recipes date back hundreds of years in America, but their pedigree goes back to at least the High Middle Ages, when European bakers emptied their pantries of every last good thing they […]
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