I’m going to be vacationing on the Big Island of Hawaii for the next week. I don’t know if I’ll be able to upload any photos while I’m there, but I’ll give it a shot. If not, I’ll be back in a week. Aloha!

I knew I’d catch it eventually…. This is the cookbook meme started over at Spiceblog and sent to me by Mika. DOing this made me realise that I don’t own a lot of bread baking books. I tend to look online for recipes and insipration, or to grab one recipe from each book. I should really pick some up!

1. Rationale behind what we’re seeing?
This shelf is in a semi-hallway and nothing else fit it appropriately. As such, it became the cookbook self. There isn’t much order, nor are all my cookbooks on this shelf. But I wasn’t about to go hunting them all down for a photo. The top shelf has notebooks of recipe clippings from my mother that I don’t think I have ever look in, as well as the tall cookbooks that didn’t fit onto the middle shelf. The middle shelf is at eye level and should contain books I look at frequently, but my most frequently used books are often floating around the house and never make it to the shelf. I tend to set books down on the bottom there, along with stacks of cooking magazines. My EatingWell’s are in the kitchen, along with a couple other favorites.
I get a lot of inspiration from other bloggers and the internet, too.

2. Most recommended?
The Best Recipe. It offers a ton of insight as to why things work a certain way - I learned a lot for this book.
3. Cookbook that made you what you were?
The thing that inspired me most, in terms of cooking, involved recipes, but was not a cookbook. When I first began watching Sweet Dreams, on the Food Network, I couldn’t believe that I had been missing out on so much. Gale Gand made it look easy. And you know what? It is.
4. Porniest cookbook?
Baking with Julia.
5. Sophie’s Choice cookbook?
Not making that call unless I have to.
6. If you were a cookbook, which cookbook would you be?
Which would I be or which would I like to be? The Joy of Cooking.
7. If your cookbook were extremely valuable, so valuable you might hide it with other valuables, where would that place be?
Since I seem to spend quite a bit of my money on cookbooks… I’d have to say I’d hide it on the shelf in my hallway!

I have to see what Niki has on her cookbook shelf!

Lots of recipes today! I made puff pastry from scratch. It is far and away the best puff pastry I have ever tasted. I’m modest, I know, but man it’s good.

I have, as have many other people, only ever used frozen puff pastry. It is convenient, inexpensive and works very well. I can now proudly say that I have passed the puff pastry trial by fire and joined the ranks of the bloggers who did it before me. To put it briefly, it involves a lot of butter, a lot of folding and a lot of rolling. You also have to keep it cold the whole time.

One of the biggest challenges is to keep the pressure even the whole time you are working with the dough so your edges will stay straight and none of the butter will be able to escape. Several people in class had problems with this and their pastry became gooey as their holes got larger and butter escaped.

To make a good pastry, shape your butter into an even rectangular block before you begin. Mush the block together and refrigerate to keep it firm. This way you will only have one piece of butter to work with and you will not have to worry about individual pieces moving around. Use lots of flour when rolling to prevent the dough from sticking. There is plenty of butter in the pasty, so you will not toughen it by using flour! A few people, since they were not using enough flour, had problems rolling their dough. The best way to roll is use lots of short strokes, which will prevent the butter from being pushed to the side and out of the dough. If you do make a small hole, dab a bit of flour over it so it doesn’t stick to the rolling pin and continue on. It will probably get covered during the next fold.

Many instructions state that it is necessary to make 6 turns in your pastry. When you’re making it by hand, you should only make 3 or 4 turns. It simply isn’t that practical to try so many turns without the consistency of a machine - your odds of tearing your dough or squeezing out the butter really increase. Try for 4 turns and stop at 3 if you seem to be getting a few holes. As long as the butter stays inside your pastry, your dough will still be flaky.

(more…)

Blondies are a great thing to make when you’re visiting someone else’s home. They are as simple as baking a batch of cookies, but actually take less time because all the dough goes into the oven at once. You can add anything that is lying around the kitchen, so having anything beyond the basic butter-sugar-flour-egg ingredients is not vital. Chocolate chips, nuts, chopped candy bars, dried fruit or candied fruit will all work. Much like making brownies, there is no need for multiple pans. And, of course, cookies require nothing beyond a bowl and a spoon for mixing.

I visited my brother this weekend and wanted to bake something for him and the guys he lives with. There are 5 of them, in total. Now, these guys do cook for themselves - not haute cuisine, but they know how to use appliances other than the microwave. Cooking is not a priority for them, though, so sometimes specific utensils or equipment that I consider vital are lacking: spatulas, whisks, an actual baking sheet (they use a round pizza pan). I used a 9×13 casserole dish, lined with aluminium foil. I recommend lining the pan instead of greasing it with butter or cooking spray because the blondies will be much easier to remove. They had flour, sugar, butter and eggs, though the brown sugar and the baking soda that I used I bought for them on my last visit. I used chopped up Hershey bars and butterscotch chips, roughly equal amounts of each, but probably a bit more chocolate. Total time took about 30 minutes, not including preheating or mise en place. Easy.

Once baked, the blondies can be cut into any sized bar. So they work as well for a crowd as they do for a small group.

(more…)

Still reeling from my success with gelatin in the last IMBB, I tried my had at another gelatin dessert. I found Cardamom Yogurt Pudding on Epicurious. It looked so simple that I had to try it.

As always, I read the reviews first. The feedback from other cooks is usually very helpful. I noted that several of them mentioned that they had to increase the amount of gelatin. I decided to add vanilla paste to the yogurt instead of flavoring it with cardamom. I increased the amount of gelatin without considering that I was also using greek style yogurt, which is much thicker than regular whole milk yogurt. This resulted in a pudding that was tasty, but too firm. Fortunately, I had roasted some grapes to accompany it and their heat caused the pudding to melt a bit. Everything turned out deliciously, even it it wan’t the texture I was hoping for. Next time the pudding will turn out better, but I couldn’t have hoped for better results on the grapes, which were amazing. Divide the grapes into small bunches - they look gorgeous.

(more…)

Thank you elise for picking such a great theme. Gelatin really set me off on a series of recipes that I wouldn’t ordinarily have made. Beyond making Jello as a child, rather poorly, I might add, I had no experience with gelatin before this event. I seem to be a bit hooked at the moment, though. Gelatin is very easy to work with and can be mixed with just about any liquid to make an easy, light jelly or mousse.

While scouting for appealing recipes, I came across a recipe on the Food Network website for Root Beer Gelee and Vanilla Panna Cotta. I love root beer floats and that is what came to my mind immediately when I saw their photo. How could you not love a tall glass of cool root beer poured over a big scoop of vanilla ice cream? I imagined that the combination of panna cotta and root beer would be similar in flavor. It turned out to be a great combination.

Unfortunately, I had no root beer and used vanilla bean cream soda instead, as you cen see in the photo, so this is not actually a root beer float. I really enjoyed this dessert, though, and think that it would have been fantastic with root beer. Root beer has a stronger flavor than cream soda and, though the vanilla melded well with the panna cotta, I think something slightly more assertive would have been more interesting.

It didn’t take very long to set the gelatin, but do be careful when pouring in the panna cotta layer. I would advise you to pour it down the side of the glass to avoid putting pressure on the surface of the root beer layer. You can leave it in your fridge for quite some time before serving, but because the panna cotta layer is not so thick, I would suggest letting it soften slightly at room temperature for 10 or 15 minutes before serving.