This was an easy one to do. The birthday girl, who has problems with digesting wheat, specifically asked that I make the Hippie With a Minivan black bean cake for her, since the last time she had it some years ago it left quite an impression on her. There were…
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…
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…
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…
You know how I said in my notes for the eight-yolk gold cake that I wasn’t going to make this? I lied. I was out of icing sugar to make the glaze I had in mind, so when I found a carton of pasteurized egg whites in my fridge, I…
Invariably, after making an angel food cake, the pressing question becomes “what do I do with all of these yolks?” Usually the answer is some form of custard; for me, it’s David Lebovitz’s vanilla ice cream recipe. This time, I didn’t have the cream on hand to make ice cream,…
