// archives

Baking and Pastry

This category contains 20 posts
Cuisinart Dough Blade

Cuisinart Dough Blade

We’ve had a Cuisinart food processor for years, and I’ve been using the standard blade for making pie dough for quite awhile with fairly decent results (I usually make an all-butter, 50% whole wheat dough, so it just can’t compete for texture with lard/shortening all-white-flour crusts). For some reason, we never really paid much [...]

Joe’s Chipotle-Garlic Sauce

Joe’s Chipotle-Garlic Sauce

Though I love hot and spicy food, I was never much of a fan of chipotle peppers until I tasted this sauce that my friend Joe whipped up one evening while Tiger and I were over at his place for dinner. It’s a gorgeous dark red sauce, and I don’t think my photo does [...]

Rainbow Cookies

Rainbow Cookies

To finish off writing about the Christmas treats I made, here’s my last big project of the season (that I managed to get to: Rainbow Cookies from Sherry Yard’s fantastic book The Secrets of Baking.

These were hugely popular with everyone who received them. How could they not be, looking that adorably festive on [...]

Sourdough from scratch

Sourdough from scratch

I figured that I would finally come out of my hive and talk about the sourdough bread I spent a week working on while I was snowed in before Christmas. As you may have inferred from other posts here, I’m basically cooking my way through The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which I think has to [...]

Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut

Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut

At the beginning of Life of Pi, the narrator promises that it is a story to make you believe in God. So let me begin this way: These are macaroons to make you believe in coconut.

The Christmas Unicorn

The Christmas Unicorn

I had more people to give gifts to, so I made another round of Christmas cookies this week. I wanted to do a half batch of the icing and tried to wing it with the corn syrup and milk measurements so as not to dirty more dishes, but it didn’t set up quite as [...]

Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 2

Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 2

Printable Recipe
Last time on As the Fondant Liquefies, we made cherry-flavored fondant and dipped maraschino cherries in it, in preparation for dipping them in chocolate. Really, that’s the hardest part of the whole process.
I decided to make another batch of cherries after the ones I documented in the original post and test the theory [...]

Christmas Cookies

Christmas Cookies

Still, I felt a little…well, like I was approaching the half-assedness I had set out to avoid in the first place. I was supposed to be spending hours and hours aggravating my poor sore wrist and shoulder with the piping. And the last time I’d tried to decorate cookies with this kind of icing in multiple colors…it hadn’t gone well. I remember thinking that those were some ugly Thanksgiving Day turkeys to be putting out on a restaurant buffet…

Test Cherry #1

Test Cherry #1

Test Cherry: Day One
Originally uploaded by the other tiger
As I was dipping a second round of cherries yesterday, I had three lose their stems and become “test cherries” or, in other words, the cherries I get to eat before they’re ready without feeling guilty for wasting one I could be giving to someone else, [...]

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 1

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 1

Printable Recipe
Heading into my senior year in college, my mom and I realized that I was going to most likely be moving not just across town but out of town after graduation and my wedding the next summer, ending the days of having just a short trip on the freeway between us. I’d been [...]

Like us on Facebook!