Recipes, experiments (successful or otherwise), food you remember from your childhood, eating out. It's all welcome here.
If I recall correctly, using brown sugar tends to push the cookies more toward the "chewy/soft" end of the "crunchy/crisp <—> chewy/soft" spectrum. The higher the proportion of brown to white, the farther along it shoves them.
Anyway, the cake is in the oven and the sink is full of dirty dishes again. That's really the only part of baking I don't enjoy — doing all the dishes. In this case, since I was increasing the recipe by .5, I have extra bowls —- the one I measured the eggs and oil into, the one I measured the pineapple into, and the one I put the chopped walnuts in so that they were ready to add right away instead of stopping to chop them with the batter half-made.
edited 25th Sep '12 10:44:34 AM by Madrugada
Oh, I will, trust me
. I won't know till tomorrow night, though. It wasn't till I actually started mixing it that how strange it is really struck me, though: no water, no milk, no vanilla. I sort of half-assedly drained the pineapple. I don't know whether that was what was intended or not. And I valiantly resisted the urge to dink around with it, adding more spice, like ground clove or nutmeg or allspice. I'm proud of myself. And the batter tasted really good. Yes, I lick the beaters when I'm done. And the spoon. And the spatula. And the bowl. Salmonella risk from raw eggs be damned.
edited 25th Sep '12 11:14:53 AM by Madrugada
Made the Raw Apple Bread from Beard on Bread tonight, with my standard changes: 1.5x the amount of apples, a rounded teaspoon of cinnamon, a pinch of allspice, and yoghurt instead of buttermilk. I like buttermilk, I just don't keep it around. The bread isn't raw, only the apples when you add them in.
It has apples and walnuts and a nicely crunchy crust. I tried a new thing for me tonight though, I used the loaf pan to toast the walnuts in the pre-heated oven, thus saving a pan to wash. The only difficulty was that I didn't do it soon enough, and the pan was hot to handle when I added the batter.
Beard on Bread is a very reliable cookbook, I've liked all the recipes I've tried from it. The lemon bread is particularly good with a blueberry sauce over it.
The cake looks delicious! And I too lick my bowls and implements, I figure I probably have immunity by now...
edited 25th Sep '12 8:44:50 PM by Lightningnettle
Shima: this
◊ is how much of it was gone at about an hour after arrival. By the time I left at 10, it was down to about a third of this, and almost everyone had left. Some of the comments:
- "Stupendous!"
- "The best carrot cake I've ever had."
- "Fabulous!"
- "The woman who gave you this recipe — is she single? I'd marry her for this cake."
- "Excellent"
- "So good"
- "Wait, it's got pineapple in it?"
I think they liked it.
I know I did.
Maddie, I'm going to give it a shot at some point (although, I'll have to mess with the mass: I don't have a lot of people to feed). Most importantly, my Mum is trying it out for a church do this coming weekend for harvest festival: it goes into the oven on Friday. Seeing as the harvest has been crap, to say the least, she needed a recipe to lift spirits, and I handed Shima's Carrot Cake over, as she wanted something different from her usual ones.
She'll try to race you for the Magical Disappearing Cake prize.
edited 26th Sep '12 10:22:41 PM by Euodiachloris
I think I will trust Maddy's judgement on this and also add it to my recipe book.
Drunkscribleirian's asked me to make more of that spicy-savory zucchini bread for his birthday party, so I started the biga dough tonight so I can have this done by Saturday.
edited 27th Sep '12 1:08:21 AM by DrunkGirlfriend
"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -DrunkscriblerianEudia: If you don't have a lot of people, use the recipe just the way Shima posted it: that will make a nicely-sized two-layer cake, although you might want to double the frosting recipe to be sure you don't have too thin of a coat.
If your mom wants to make the larger recipe, here's what I did to make it 1.5 times larger, for the 9x13 pan:
- multiply each of the flour, sugar, cinnamon, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and oil (I used corn oil) by 1.5 straight up.
- instead of three large eggs, I used 4 jumbos.
- Instead of one small can of pineapple (8 oz by weight), I got a large one (20 oz by weight) (in natural pineapple juice, not syrup), mostly drained it and used a heaping cup of it, so probably about 9 fluid ounces by volume.
- I bought carrot preshredded since my food processor does a crap job of shedding anything. It came in 10 ounce (weight) bags, and I used one and slightly more than half of a second — so a pound (or around there) of carrot shred.
- The walnuts was a 2.25 ounce (64 gram) bag of chopped walnuts from the baking section. I don't use nuts consistently enough to make getting a big bag worth it, they tend to go rancid before I use them up.
Oiled a non-stick pan, put baking parchment on the bottom and oiled that.
The batter filled the pan about 3/4 of the way to the top.
And then I made a double batch of frosting; didn't measure the sugar or the vanilla but started with two 8 oz blocks of cream cheese.
Baked it at 325F, set the timer for 55 minutes at first, and checked it when it went off. The outside edges were nicely crusted and caramelized, so I made a foil frame to cover them and leave the center exposed, and gave it 5 more. it was still wet in the center, so I gave it 8 more. Toothpick test still didn't quite come out clean, so I gave it five more. Toothpick came out clean, so I called it done.
Cooled it in the pan for about three hours, turned it out and onto the serving tray, covered it and put it in the fridge. Cake came out of the oven Tuesday about one PM, was frosted Wednesday about 2 pm, went back into the fridge until I was ready to leave about 5. Served Wednesday about 5:30 pm.
edited 27th Sep '12 3:18:40 AM by Madrugada

Does anyone have a recipe for white chocolate macadamia cookies?
"Doctor Who means never having to say you're kidding." - Bocaj