Archive for: review
Frosting Creations are a new product from Duncan Hines that attempts to revolutionize canned frosting. Canned frostings typically come in basic flavors, such as chocolate and vanilla. With Frosting Creations, you get a can of plain frosting and can choose from a variety of flavorings to add to it to make flavors that are much more distinctive than those you’ll usually find in the baking aisle. There are a dozen flavors and they include Caramel, Cherry Vanilla and White Chocolate Raspberry, as well as over the top kid flavors, like Cotton Candy and Bubble Gum. The flavors are concentrated and come in a powder that you simply stir into the plain frosting.
I don’t typically use canned frosting, but I usually have one tucked away in the back of the pantry just in case, and I admit that I was very curious about how these new flavors would taste – especially some of the flavors that had a more “premium” sound to them.
The base frosting was your typical canned frosting, creamy and sweet but with little flavor. The flavor packets stirred in easily, with a little bit of vigorous stirring with a knife or spatula. I tried Orange Creme, Caramel and Bubble Gum. Orange Creme promised to be a creamsicle flavor and it did add a subtle orange flavor to the frosting. It was even better with a little bit of orange zest added to it, which popped the citrus more and let the frosting provide the vanilla. Bubble Gum looked and tasted like, well, bubble gum. It was not something I would eat again in all honesty – but I do know a few kids who loved it (especially on a chocolate cupcake) because they had never had anything like it before. My favorite was caramel, which did have a nice caramel flavor and tempered the sweetness of the plain frosting a bit. It’s still not going to replace homemade, but it was a lot more interesting than most canned frostings I’ve had and would be great on a yellow cake.
Overall, I think that this is a really fun concept and can deliver a lot more flavor options than you could find with off-the-shelf frostings. It’s fun to play with the flavors (especially if kids are involved) and couldn’t be easier.
And if you want to know a little secret, you can use these flavoring packets with homemade frostings (American buttercream made with butter, confectioners’ sugar and milk) for a very easy way to change the flavor of your frosting but start with a little bit tastier base.
Nonstick parchment paper is a great tool to have in the kitchen. Perfect for lining cookie sheets and cake pans, parchment paper makes cleanup easy and prevents your baked goods from sticking to your pans. Parchment paper is best used on flat surfaces (such as the bottom of pans), but there are things that I bake that I like to be able to lift out of the pan for cooling, slicing and serving. These include coffee cakes, brownies and bar cookies, and when making these types of baked goods, I typically line my pans with aluminum foil and lightly grease it. I can lift the foil right out of the pan (I wrap it up, over the sides) and my baked goods don’t stick.
Reynolds Wrap has managed to combine aluminum foil and parchment paper into one product, their new Nonstick Pan Lining Paper. This paper has foil on one side and parchment on the other. The idea is that the foil allows the paper to conform to the shape of the pan – sides and all – but the parchment paper gives it a nonstick finish with no extra greasing required. This product is a little more expensive than both foil and parchment are, but I picked up a roll recently to see how it performed.
The paper feels heavy, much thicker than either plain aluminum foil or parchment paper. It pressed easily into my pans (sheet pans with shallow sides and deeper, rectangular baking dishes), wrapping into the corners and up the sides easily and staying exactly where I contoured it to my pan, although I noticed that it didn’t have quite as much flexibility as plain aluminum foil. The parchment side of the paper worked just like regular parchment, so it definitely didn’t need to be greased. Overall, I was happy with the performance, but lightly greased aluminum foil works just as well for most baking applications. I would choose this for more heavy duty baking (like lasagna, which Reynolds Wrap actually recommends) where I would think that foil alone might not hold up to the job.
Update: My paper did curl around the edges when I used it on baking sheets without “wrapping” the edges around the sides of the pan, however this didn’t seem to impact what I was baking in any way, as the thick paper stayed flat under my baked goods.
When you do a lot of baking, oven mitts and potholders are an everyday tool that is as important as your oven is – especially if you want to get whatever you’re baking out of the oven. While you can use a dishtowel wrapped around your hand, oven mitts give you a better grip and a little more peace of mind when lifting anything out of a 350F oven. Towards the holidays, more people than usual are baking, whether they’re roasting a turkey for Thanksgiving or baking batches of holiday Christmas cookies, and that means that the review of oven mitts in a recent issue (Dec/Jan 2012) of Cook’s Country should come in handy for almost everyone.
The magazine set out to find an oven mitt that offered a lot of heat protection as well as offering a lot of maneuverability. Mitts that were too thick made it difficult to grip a cookie sheet securely, while thinner mitts gave you a more secure grip. Some of those thinner mitts, however, didn’t offer the heat protection of the larger gloves. They tested the mitts with casserole dishes pulled from a 450F oven and, to measure heat resistance, held them as long as possible (do not try this at home!) while they were wired with heat sensors to see how much heat got through the gloves and how quickly. They also looked for mitts that were washable and easy to care for.
The test winner was the Kool-Tek 15-inch Oven Mitt, which offered great heat resistance, good pan control and came out of the laundry looking good-as-new. Also highly recommended was the Orkaplus Silicone Oven Mitt with Cotton Lining, which performed as well as the Kool-Tek for less than half the price. Gloves that came in with lower, but still good, ratings included the Calphalon 14-inch Oven Mitt and the Oxo Good Grips Silicone Oven Mitt which were not as grip-friendly as the winners, as well as the Le Creuset Oven Mitt, which work well but didn’t hold up quite as well after repeated washings.
You’re probably used to seeing the same types of chocolate chips in markets over and over, so when I saw the bright white packaging of Enjoy Life Semisweet Chocolate Mega Chunks, it caught my eye and I picked one up to try. Enjoy Life products are made without the eight most common food allergens – wheat, dairy, peanuts, tree nuts, egg, soy, fish and shellfish – and are marketed as being allergy friendly. Their chocolate chunks are also marketed as being allergy friendly, and they definitely are, as it says right on the packaging that they are manufactured in a dedicated nut and gluten free facility on a product line dedicated to dairy and soy free products.
The chocolate chunks contain evaporated cane juice, chocolate and cocoa butter. Most semisweet chocolate is made with just sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter and sometimes vanilla (some brands have an emulsifier added, as well, but not all), so I wasn’t surprised when this chocolate tasted almost exactly the same as other semisweet chocolates I’ve tried. It had a good, not-too-sweet flavor and an excellent melt on the tongue. I liked the bar-like shape of the chocolate chunks, which varied in length but not width, and felt that they were a great shape for chocolate chip cookies. Not needing an allergy free food, I would buy these again just because I liked the flavor and the shape of them. It’s great for those with food allergies to know that these chocolate chips, although they are made in pretty much the same way as other chocolate chips, are made in a facility where they won’t be exposed to other allergens, so you can enjoy your chocolate chip cookies – gluten free, peanut free or just regular cookies – without worries and with some good chocolate chunks.
The people at New Metro Design, who brought you the BeaterBlade and the MixerMate Bowl, are at it again with the ZestN’est. The ZestN’est is an updated take on a microplane and is designed with zesting citrus in mind. The gadget is shaped like a half of a lemon, with a microplane-style grater on what would be the cut side of the fruit. As you grate, the zest falls right into the N’est, which pops open to release the zest when you’re ready to add it to the rest of your cooking or baking ingredients. It also comes with a cover that will allow you to store the zest in the N’est and keep it fresh.
I really liked the look and the design of the ZestN’est right off the bat. It was easy to hold, and the way it collected the zest was convenient. The stainless steel zesting blade seemed unusually sharp to me, and it is indeed designed to give you either a fine or coarse zest depending on how much pressure you use. Longer, coarser zest would be better for garnishing drinks than baking, and it took me a few tries to get use to using less pressure to get the zest I wanted. I liked this zester even more for shaving chocolate and grating spices. For these two tasks, which usually result in very fine particles getting all over my cutting board, the N’est really came in handy to collect all of my shavings and the blade was easily sharp enough to grate nutmeg and cinnamon with very little effort. I’m not going to replace my microplanes with these (yes, I do have multiple microplanes), but it’s a useful and attractive gadget to keep around or to gift to someone that might need a little zest in their lives.
