Thursday, December 04, 2008

Stuff I'd Like to Cook

Some days you say, "I can't handle X." You avoid dealing with X. Then Y crops up and makes you realize that X is SO no big deal and you could SO handle X if only Y wasn't demanding your attention? Well, I'm ignoring both X AND Y to share with you a few recipes that I'd much rather be making than handling either X or Y.

  • Pumpkin Cupcakes with Maple Cream Cheese Frosting from Smitten Kitchen via Not Martha - did I mention that I recently found out my father-in-law hates maple syrup? The very concept of someone not liking maple syrup blows my mind.
  • Bakerella's Moist Yellow Cake via Not Martha - though maybe without the artificial butter flavoring
  • DIY vanilla extract from Vanilla Review via Angry Chicken - did I mention I think I killed my Cuisinart? It's directions TOLD me to put the cheese in the freezer before running it through the shredding attachment. So why oh why did that cause an odd smell and possibly smoke to emanate from the base just prior to becoming completely unresponsive? This has nothing to do with Vanilla Review's instructions for making vanilla extract.
  • Quick Fix Fajitas from Serious Eats - the death of my Cuisinart is neither the X nor the Y that I am avoiding by composing this post. Let's call it z. Just lowercase. No big thing. This has nothing to to with Serious Eats' recipe for Quick Fix Fajitas.
  • Pan De Elote (Mexican Pan Cornbread) from Serious Eats
  • Root Beer Bundt Cake from Serious Eats' Cook the Book series on Baked: New Frontiers in Baking

Click here to return to Gnomicon home page

3 comments:

Rebecca said...

It used to be that I thought I liked the fake syrup better than maple syrup. Maple has a slight bitterness to it that is unexpected in syrup, if you are used to the aunt jemima kind. I recently bought some aunt jemima though and had to throw it away because it was so disgusting compared to maple syrup that I am now accustomed to.

I thought it was weird that the yellow cake recipe had butter flavoring too. Why? I don't get it.

Let me know if you like the root beer cake. I couldn't decide if I wanted to make that or not...

David said...

Actually, for my dad the choice is between any kind of maple-like syrup (including the aunt jemima kinds), and Golden Syrup, which Sarah describes as "sugar urine." That is, it's a byproduct of refining sugar cane juice into sugar. It's a British slash Commonwealth thing. The Scottsman Abram Lyle invented it in 1883. The classic tin it comes in has the picture of a rotting carcass of a lion with a swarm of bees, and the slogan "Out of the strong came forth sweetness" (Wikipedia). This is why it never appealed to me as a small child.

Scholeologist said...

We saw Golden Syrup in England; I knew there was a lion on the tin, but I must not have paid any attention to the rotting and bees, which is hilarious.

I was going to say something about Golden Syrup being molasses, but Wikipedia tells me how wrong I am. Apparently light molasses is treacle, but Golden Syrup is different from that.
(I then got lost in Wikipedia's description of blackstrap molasses, and sugar molasses is also not to be confused with sorghum syrup, which is a different thing but is sometimes confusingly called molasses, and invert sugars and...well, you know how it goes.)