Experiment: A Mess (Poured Fondant)

My sister needed to bake up some cookies to send to a friend, so I suggested a method of decorating that I'd wanted to try for some time now: poured fondant. It is, in essence, the same thing as glace icing, but instead of adding more liquid, you heat it up juuust a little to get the sugar to a liquid state, then beat the mixture briefly to force the recrystallization of the sugar to remain fine and even. This supposedly allows you to simply pour it over whatever baked good you're trying to decorate for a solid, even layer. It sets quickly by cooling, then locks into a matte sugar shell within 24 hours.

The recipe is fantastically simple:

6 cups confectioner's sugar
1/2 cup water
2 Tablespoons light corn syrup
1~2 teaspoons extract flavoring as desired
food coloring as desired

Mix everything in a pot over low heat to 92~100 degrees F, pour over something edible.

Here's the mixing...

 ...and, uh... the aftermath of the pouring.  

Disclaimer: Those cookies with clean-cut edges in the back of the image were achieved by literally carving them out of a sheet of hardened fondant sludge.

In brief, this is a hard process to control. Even with twice the water called for in the recipe and increasing the temperature all the way to 105 degrees F, the fondant was never thin enough to really pour over the cookies. It was more like laying down sugary tarp that kinda draped over the sides of each cookie and made indistinct sugary lumps of all of them. I'm not quite sure why this happened, but I suspect either the distinct lack of humidity in the desert or the cheap confectioner's sugar I picked up at Walmart is to blame.

One more try, dipping the cookies into the fondant while keeping it over steady low heat. They do this with cupcakes, the Internet tells me.

what the Internet tells me

real life*

...dipping 0.25" thick cookies into hot sugar sludge = not the most fun thing ever. SIGH.

Maybe I'll make petit fours someday, but I won't revisit poured fondant until then.

This will be my last attempt at decorated cookies for a while as I get back to posting patterns I have neglected for a long time.

* I really wanted to photoshop David DeVore into that image, but alas, I have neither the time nor the skills.

Fruit Overload

AAAAAAAAUGH~~

Arizona is a great climate for citrus trees. So great, in fact, that people plant them in their yards for decoration. People like the former owners of my house.

AND THEN THERE IS FRUIT EVERYWHERE.

There wouldn't be so much fruit, actually, if it weren't for the fact that it is sunny and 79 degrees Fahrenheit today, the tenth of December. DECEMBER, damnit. Maybe it's the midwesterner in me, but the very word "December" is entirely incompatible with sunny and 79.

Meanwhile, the citrus trees apparently opine: "Hey, still warm? Let's drop a second harvest. Whee!"

Which returns me to:

AAAAAAAAUGH what do I do with all of this?!

I know what to do with lemons. Actually, I love lemons. Lemon is my favorite flavor of most anything. Lemon bars, lemon spritz cookies, lemon ice cream... here is a fantastic recipe for lemonade, by the way. I can probably use up all the lemons on my own.

Oranges... well, orange-cranberry scones are a hit with my dad, and orange juice is always good.

...but what the hell do I do with five-dozen grapefruit? o_o

St. Pancakes Day

I hope you are all full of corned beef and cabbage and potatoes... and beer, if you're of the proper age. ^w^ Here's something to be full of tomorrow morning: shamrock pancakes. (Not shamrock flavored, mind you, just shaped funny.)　四葉ホットケーキを作りましょう！

green pancake batter and strawberry pieces

Add some green food coloring to your favorite pancake batter. Also, cut up some fruit into smallish pieces. I'm using strawberries, but you can use almost anything. Bananas work really well because they're so sticky.

 (this is figure 2)

Prep your pan with oil/butter (you know how to make pancakes). Then, BEFORE you pour your pancake, put four of those little fruit pieces in the pan, as in figure 2.

*splut* is the Official Sound of Pancake Batter™

Now pour some green batter into the middle of the four fruit pieces. It should spread out between and around the fruit to make a shamrock-ish shape. You can tilt the pan a little to help form the right shape. (If your fruit pieces just get pushed out of the way, try stickier fruit or bigger pieces.)

wonky, but delicious

Ta-daa! Shamrocks, kinda! (I'm not the best at this.) With some poking and prodding, you can get much more appealing shamrocky shapes. Or, you could add more fruit pieces and make a daisy shape with 5 or 6 petals. It all depends upon how creative you can be in the early morning, before breakfast.

If you need a pancake recipe, this one's great:

Strawberry-Vanilla Pancakes

1 cup flour
0.5 cups oats (rolled, instant, steel cut, whatever)
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt

1 egg
0.75 cup milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 cup chopped strawberries
0.25 cup chopped almonds (optional)

In a large bowl, mix together flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, lightly beat together egg, milk, and vanilla. Add this mixture to the dry ingredients and stir it all together. Stir in the chopped strawberries (and almonds, if you want them).

...and if you need them:

Basic Pancake-Making Instructions

Oil or butter the bottom of a frying pan or griddle. Heat the pan over medium-high heat, or until the butter/oil starts to sizzle. Stir the batter up a little, and pour some into the pan to form a pool of your desired pancake size. Flip your pancake when bubbles appear in the middle. Repeat until all of your batter has turned into delicious pancakes. If your pancakes start sticking or burning to the pan, wipe it out and oil or butter the bottom again.

...and if you're out of maple:

Almondine Syrup

1 cup white sugar
1.25 cup brown sugar
1 cup water

1 teaspoon almond extract

Combine both sugars and water in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Stir and stir and stir, slowly but constantly, for about a minute as the pot heats up. There is too much sugar for the water to dissolve it all, so you’ll have a sugary sludge on the bottom and liquid on the top. Let the mixture heat up to the boiling point, giving it a slow but thorough stir about once a minute.

Once the mixture begins to boil, start stirring constantly. Boil the syrup (still stirring) for roughly 3 minutes, monitoring the temperature so that it doesn’t boil over or burn. The syrup should now be a transparent dark brown liquid.

Remove the saucepan from heat and immediately add the almond extract (it might puff or hiss when it hits the hot syrup; this is a good sign). Stir the pot about 20 times around to be sure everything is mixed together, then cover the syrup with plastic wrap and let it cool to room temperature (takes a few hours). Don’t put it in the fridge yet!

Once your syrup is cool, it’s ready to enjoy. Store extra syrup in an airtight container in the fridge. It might form a sugar crust on the top, but unless it grows something really strange, like fuzz or spots on the surface, it’s still okay to eat.

3.1415926YEAAAAAAAH

It's Pi Day! The best math-and-pastry-based holiday of the year! I'm making this pie right now; will post pictures later if it works out.

UPDATE: Well, it was delicious, but ugly. At least it was low fat. :3

These, meanwhile, are not ugly:

apple

pumpkin

candied lemon

um... cranberry fish... ?

My clever sister makes very tiny things out of polymer clay, including pies. You can see all of her work in detail here: Fushica on Deviant Art.


And for my nerd comrades: the Pi Calc applet by Mikko Tommila.

Note to Self

I'm putting this here for my own benefit, so I don't keep losing it when it falls off the fridge. By all means, please do try it for yourself if you like fluffy, thick pizza crust.

The Best Pizza Crust Recipe I Have Ever Found
in Eleven Years of Searching
poorly illustrated by Ku

Notes in addendum:

"Rapid rise yeast" means exactly that; active dry isn't powerful enough for a fluffy dough. "Knead a whole lot" means fold and smash and roll up and repeat like 20 or 30 times. "Punch down the dough" might mean something else to serious chefs, but in this recipe it means "beat the shit out of it for serious". Adding a tablespoon of crushed rosemary to the dry flour makes it herby-good. :D

Kitchen Status: Fully Operational

There's nothing like moving across the country to turn up stuff you didn't even know you had.

Like a bundt pan. o_o' And when life unpacks you a bundt pan, there is but one thing to do.

Almond Bundt Cake
with almond drizzle icing and toasted almonds


Original recipes from Allrecipes.com: Glazed Almond Bundt Cake and Vanilla Glaze;
altered and recombined from suggestions on the site and the availability of stuff in my kitchen.

Cake Ingredients:

2.5 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
0.5 teaspoon salt
0.5 cup raw, ground almonds*
1 cup of butter, softened
2 cups of white sugar
4 eggs
2 teaspoons almond extract
1.5 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup milk

*can sometimes be found ground in the store, but the best way to get ground almonds is to take slivered or sliced almonds and put them in a food processor for about 30 seconds, just until they're in tiny bits. If you're using whole almonds, add a little granulated sugar to the processor to help keep the almond oil from binding your grinds into a paste.

Cake Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Generously grease and flour a 10 (12) inch Bundt pan. If you skimp on the pan greasing+flouring, you will have a hell of a time getting your finished cake out of the pan. Seriously.
2. Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and ground almonds. Set aside.
3. In a large bowl, cream together the butter and 2 cups sugar until light and fluffy. If using an electric mixer, use medium speed to introduce ingredients to each other, then high to cream them together. Beat in the eggs two at a time at low speed, then stir in the almond extract and vanilla.
   
4. Adding your dry ingredients to the wet, alternately beat in (at low speed) the flour mixture and 1 cup milk, mixing just until you have a homogeneous batter. Pour batter into prepared pan.
5. Bake in the preheated oven for 45 to 50 minutes, or until a stick of dry spaghetti inserted into the center of the width of the cake comes out clean. Cool cake in pan for 10 minutes, then turn it over and ease it out of the pan onto a wire rack. Allow cake to cool completely before icing.

Almond Icing:

1.5 cups confectioners' sugar
2.5 tablespoons milk
1/8 teaspoon salt (aka "two pinches")
0.25 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon melted butter

Put the dry ingredients in a bowl, then add the wet ingredients and stir until you have a creamy consistency. Easy. Drizzle the icing over your cooled cake.

The only thing left to do is sprinkle some toasted almond slices on there. To toast them fresh (always better than buying toasted almond bits from the store), just spread about a half cup of raw sliced almonds on a baking pan and pop them into the oven at 350 for about 5 to 7 minutes. You can do this while preheating the oven for the cake. :D

This cake kept pretty well in just a tupperware box, actually, and was eaten (with family, although I COULD have finished it off all by myself) over the course of 5 days. Almondy goodness for breakfast. >w<

楽しみして！

Cranberrilous*

*Like persimmonius, not really a word.

There is a new camera in the family.

★o(´∇｀*o)♪☆YAY!☆♪(o*´∇｀)o★

This excites and pleases me beyond all measures. At long last, I don’t have to use my ancient 3MP, 2x-zoom, fresh-batteries-last-five-minutes, flash-is-dead, low-exposure, why-can’t-the-ISO-ever-reach-100-for-the-love-of-god Sony. To be fair, Sony, I really liked you. You could take a decent picture if it was high noon on a sunny day and everything in the frame was absolutely stationary and nothing of a bright red hue was present in the immediate vicinity. But now you suck. Into the backup bag with ye. *clunk*

Hello, Olympus! I’mma call you “Ollie.” :D

In honor of Ollie For the purposes of a company Christmas party, there was some pie-making yesterday. The pie was required to have a Christmas flair about it, so my usual repertoire (apple, pumpkin, lemon) was of no use. Fortunately, there exists a lovely (read: extremely easy) recipe for cranberry pie.

I figured a cranberry pie must be really sour and tangy. The recipe is too easy, something has to be wrong with it. Maybe the pie bubbles over or burns easily or turns bitter. Something.

Nope.

Easiest damn pie ever.
Delicious as all hell.

I tweaked the original recipe just a little, and here it is:

Cranberry Pie

2 cans (16oz) of whole-berry cranberry sauce
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
2 tablespoons butter or margarine, softened
1 pie crust in 9” deep-dish pan

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. In a large bowl, mix all the ingredients together (except the crust in the pan, obviously) until there are no visible clumps of sugar or spices, and the buttery bits are small and evenly dispersed in the sauce. Pour cranberry filling into your pie crust; leave the fill level about a 1/4 inch from the absolute top, because the filling does rise a little bit. Bake pie in the preheated oven for about an hour, or until crust looks done.

If you want to decorate the top, you can make cut-outs from extra pie dough, bake them on a pan for a few minutes, and then put them on the finished pie. Or use chipped nuts; walnuts and pecans taste good with cranberries.

Optionally, I imagine you could top the nearly-finished pie with butter crumbles and it’d be similarly fantastic, if not more so:

Butter Crumbles

3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
5 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted

Put everything in a bowl and stir it together until it’s crumbly. Put it on top of an open-face pie about ten minutes before it’s done and return crumble-topped pie to the oven for the rest of the ride.

Yay pie, yay camera. うれしい〜！>w<

“I was told there’d be biscuits.”

...and there are! :D

EDIT: Okay, as of September 2010, I have finally found the original paper copy of this damn recipe and have fixed it. The actual amount of milk is 3/4 cups. If you are using soy milk, per the lovely Calista, you will likely need one and one quarter cups of it.

They were born from the barely legible photocopy of a recipe, originally produced on an electric typewriter, handed out in seventh grade home economics class. The amounts of each ingredient were written entirely in teaspoons and fractions thereof, I suppose as an exercise to teach seventh-graders the conversion from teaspoons to cups and tablespoons. (We had yet to be visited by the saving grace of online unit-conversion sites, nor even desktop converter widgets.)

The title of the recipe is “Delicious Biscuits.”

The title is correct.

So delicious are the biscuits, in fact, that I have been compelled to keep safe the original page for more than a decade, render the teaspooniness out of it, and at long last commend it to the open internet where it can spread its powers of biscuitry to the ends of the earth.

Here y’all go:

Delicious Biscuits

2 cups all-purpose flour, sifted*
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup shortening
3/4 cup milk

*can switch to 1 cup all-purpose and 1 cup wheat flour if desired; increase milk to one cup

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Sift all the dry ingredients (flour, salt, baking powder) together in a bowl. Add the shortening and cut it in with a pastry cutter or a fork until it’s in small enough crumbly pieces that it sorta vanishes into the dry ingredients. Add the milk all at once and stir it in to make a sticky dough. Turn dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead 8 to 10 times. Roll dough to about 0.5 inch thick (or a little thinner) and cut out circles with a cutter or a floured glass. Place biscuits on a baking sheet about an inch apart. Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes, or until biscuits are lightly browned and delicious-looking.

Godspeed, biscuits. Godspeed.

(Happy Thanksgiving! 感謝祭おめでとう！)

the obligatory "Om Nom Nom"

Because it's birthday season, I can get away with composing a few snacks that are normally banned from the premises. I always aim for the same three: cake, lemon squares, and puppy chow. (Taiyaki would be the fourth if I had the skill to make it.) In any case, I have recently discovered that "puppy chow" is not in everyone's vocabulary, let alone in most standard cookbooks.

We shall rectify this situation!

Puppy Chow (puh-pee CHAow), noun: A homemade treat composed primarily of chocolate, peanut butter, and crunchy cereal. Intended for human consumption only. Do not feed this stuff to dogs, or to diabetics for that matter. (V. sweet)

And now, a recipe. Please note that puppy chow, like krispy squares, is in every respect a homemade sweet. Amounts and flavors can be fudged, tactics are customizable, and clean up will be necessary. Let the mess begin!

Ingredients! ...and commentary!

One (14oz) box crispy corn cereal squares
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup creamy peanut butter
1 and 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
2 cups confectioner's sugar

You can use any brand of sturdy, puffed corn cereal, but the traditional one is Chex. (Chex rhymes with Quex.)
The butter is necessary to make the chocolate/pnut butter mix liquidy enough to coat the cereal. If you use more chocolate, you'll want to add a little more butter, too.
Vanilla extract is optional. It makes a subtle difference to the chocolate element of the flavor range.
If you use crunchy peanut butter, the coating step becomes more difficult by several orders of magnitude. It can be done, but not pleasantly.
Other flavors of chips make for exotic chow. I have heard of great love for butterscotch and white chocolate.
Be liberal with the powdered sugar. It's the key to getting the pieces to be "pieces" and not "clumps."

Directions!

0) Get a big pot and a slightly smaller pot that fits inside it. We're rigging up a double boiler. (If you have an actual double boiler, go get that instead.) Put some water in the bigger pot, then nest the smaller pot inside of it so that the water comes up against the bottom and about an inch up outside of the little pot. Put the whole thing on the stove and turn the heat to medium-high. This is all so that when you melt your chocolate, it actually melts and doesn't burn like it would if you just put it in a single pot directly on the stovetop.

1) Melt the chocolate chips. Add the peanut butter, vanilla, and margerine when enough of the chips are melted that you can stir the mixture together. Keep melting and mixing until smooth.

2) Remove the mixture from heat and add the cereal. Stir the cereal around in the mixture to coat all the pieces as well as you can. It helps if you use a flat spoon and use kind of a "folding" motion. Don't be afraid of all the crunching that this step produces; most of the cereal survives crushinating.

3) Get a big container with a lid that you can shake. Big tupperware works well... so does a paper grocery bag. Anything large that can stay shut. Put a thick layer of confectioner's sugar in the bottom of your shaking device, then dump in the sticky mess of coated cereal. Cover it with another layer of sugar, then close it up tight.

4) Shake it like you mean it. No, but seriously. Shake the container very, very well. Your goal is to get the surface area of the sticky cereal bits into contact with as many sugar particles as possible.

5) Open the container and check your chow. If there are any huge clumps, break them apart, add some more confectioner's sugar, and repeat step 4. If everything looks okay, try a piece. It should look like processed dog kibble, but it will taste awesome.

6) Store in an airtight container and hide the container from your voracious family keep it in a cool, dry place. Serving size is about 1/3 cup of chow, and this recipe makes about 10 bazillion servings (something like 40~50, actually).

Cookie for You

When I was in high school, there was a little homemade ditty I shared with some good friends whenever we enjoyed a cookie after lunch. We called it the Cookie Song.

It went like this:

Cookie for me
Cookie for you
That’s the end of the song

My mother always made soft gingerbread cookies around the holidays to pass around to the family. I really didn’t like gingerbread when I was little, and I still don’t, but at the request of a family member, I made some this year. Here’s my mother’s soft gingerbread cookie recipe:

1 cup soft shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cup molasses (12 oz bottle)
2/3 cup cold water

7 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon cloves
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Cream together shortening and sugar until fluffy. Slowly add molasses, blend well. Stir in water. Sift dry ingredients together and stir into molasses mixture. Chill until firm, about 5 hours. Roll out dough on floured surface 1/4 inch thick. Cut out cookies and place on lightly greased cookie sheets with at least a centimeter space between each cookie. Bake at 350 Fahrenheit for 10-12 minutes. Makes about 60 cookies.

I would really suggest cutting this recipe in half unless you’ve got a jones for gingerbread. Happy holidays!