I want to get better at making cakes, so I’ve volunteered to make them for any interested friends to get the practice in. Related, a recent visit to a secondhand bookstore led to my acquiring The Art of Fine Baking by Paula Peck (1961), which contains several classic Northern and…
It’s the gent’s birthday tomorrow, and in his honour, we’re planning a tea party. Among the items requested was clotted cream, which currently goes for $7 for a 200 mL bottle at the local grocery store. That won’t do at all. For starters, an entire litre of whipping cream costs…
I’ll spare you the lengthy foreword and just say that I decided that a new baby in the family needs something in her life that isn’t pink, and I wanted to finally get around to making a quilt, so a happy serendipity has occurred. Here’s what I’m up to, with…
One of the best ways to determine whether you’ve managed to really nail the theory behind a process is to successfully generate an end result with it, without referring to your notes. This last Easter weekend, I managed to do just that at a retreat in a tiny cabin on…
I don’t remember when it was that I got it in my head that I needed to try making cassoulet, but, long story short, I finally broke my obsession with it when I got it right, which only involved one failure — which still ended up being quite tasty, even if…
I was looking for a recipe to use up a large container of cottage cheese that had gone untouched in the fridge for several weeks. It was starting to go sour, which meant that nobody in the house was going to eat it as is (we are picky about our…
I needed a quick and easy recipe for a thickened custard to use in trifle, and I didn’t want to go to the trouble of separating eggs and cooking to a very precise temperature. This recipe fits the bill. At some point, it might be worth making this custard and…
This is one of the best chocolate ice cream recipes to have in your repertoire. It’s creamy, smooth, not too sweet, and just the right balance of chocolate and milkiness; it tastes somewhat like eating a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar (made in England, not North America), when they still used…
I had ice cream and I wanted hot fudge sauce. I specifically wanted the kind that gets thick and glossy and chewy when it gets cold; the kind that reminds you of those DQ ice cream cakes you had as a kid before you started appreciating quality of ice cream…
I haven’t had a lot of time to experiment with hand pies, and to be honest, my desire to mess around with different kinds of recipes is not what it used to be. That’s why I count myself fortunate to have come across this recipe, because even though I thought…