When I was in college, I used to open my door during final exams and find a box of cookies underfoot. This meant that Jessica had been hard at work, somehow baking off hundreds of cookies in between studying for and taking exams. For […]
If you have leftover buttermilk, as I did, you should make this cake. This cake is a little lighter than a traditional pound cake, with a bit of tang from the buttermilk. It still has the tight and tender crumb of a pound cake, […]
Smitten Kitchen’s apple cider caramels are one of the recipes that went into this year’s cookie boxes, and seem to have been a hit, so I wanted to share the recipe for anyone who wants to make them! I love unadulterated, classic caramels, so I usually eschew any of the trendy add-ins: cayenne pepper, gingerbread spices, etc. These cider caramels are interesting as caramel recipes go, though – typically you combine everything in a pot and boil the whole mixture until it reaches the right temperature (somewhere around 250F). This recipe involves making a boiling syrup out of apple cider, then you add everything and boil it to the right temperature. Although reducing the cider to syrup takes a while, it requires very little attention, allowing you to do other things as it boils away. The boiling syrup then accelerates the caramel-boiling time, so the amount of active time seems much shorter than usual. The syrup also helps to prevent the caramel mixture from crystallizing as you stir it. Toffee, for example, can crystallize if you stir too much, because it gets cooked to a higher temperature and thus doesn’t have corn syrup or any other syrup in it to help avoid crystallization. Butter and cream have the same effect, but to a lesser degree than sugar syrups.
Flavorwise, the sharpness of the cider balances nicely with the buttery caramel. A truly good caramel won’t taste too sweet – real caramels get their flavor from milk proteins and sugars that have caramelized, rather than from corn syrup and added flavors – but for those who think that even the best caramel is too sweet, these should hit the spot. (The ingredients are pretty much the same as in the original recipe, but I’ve reduced the salt and re-written the instructions with more detail.) (more…)
this post is really about homemade samoas, a recipe that i noticed popping up on the blogs a few weeks ago. but first (first?!), a digression about that label on so many blog recipes: “recipe adapted from.” for the samoas, i used graham crackers as […]
i don’t usually take photographs at an angle – that “artistic angle” so favored by food bloggers – but for some reason, the dead-on photos just don’t look as good. something about the straight shooting suppresses the cragginess of these cookies. so, caramel melts. this […]
so i found these cookies on photograzing: apple-cider cookies with caramel inside. the photo looks amazing – a ribbon of caramel stretching lusciously between two halves of a cookie – and i’m thinking to myself, a stuffed cookie like a caramel-filled truffle? no awkward compression and repositioning of cookie filling as happens with sandwich cookies? sold.
that is, until i looked more closely at the recipe and found that all of the important flavor components come from artificial, processed sources. the cider flavor comes from cider drink mix, and the caramels are just kraft caramels from the candy aisle. typically, i would attempt to replace these ingredients with non-artificial stuff, but, well, i wanted these cookies. what do you replace apple cider drink mix with, anyway? you can’t replace it with reduced apple cider, because it throws off the balance of wet and dry ingredients, and i unfortunately don’t have a deyhydrator with which to make apple cider powder. (more…)
yeah, that was just my ploy to get you to read this. while i did just take a swig of milk that turned out to be curdled (really, whole foods? after a week?), this post is really about caramel. but first, let me tell you […]
after having dinner made for me on consecutive days (tuesday, bread pudding at 44, and wednesday, really excellent thin fettuccine with a roasted tomato and sausage sauce, at 24), i made dinner for 24 and 44. i wanted to do something fairly involved, so i […]
it’s a good thing i didn’t eat breakfast. because i just made a cake that made me remember why millions of people survived without chocolate cake for centuries.
typically i’m not a huge fan of vanilla-flavored cakes; they tend to be overly dry, or have too much vanilla…essentially i’ve come to realize that i’m just not a fan of vanilla in general, unless it’s ice cream. ice cream is one of the few venues in which producers manage not to go overboard (in the case of good vanilla ice cream).
i recently made shuna fish lydon’s caramel cake. it had a gorgeous photograph: it was golden-brown (closer to a dark brown), somewhere between a golden cake and gingerbread, with a larger-than-normal crumb. it looked moist, but not too moist, not dry, and just…beautiful. (more…)
take a moment to ponder the following phrase: “sausages with sherry caramel glazed pears.” have you ever heard anything more wonderful in your life? it was even better than i could have expected. sausage? glorious. sherry? sure. caramel glazed pears? oh yeah. then, i was […]