Bayerische Sock Finally Finished!

First of all, allow me to comment upon the difficulty of taking a good photograph of a sock that you are wearing on your own foot. It is impossible to get the angle quite right.

But I have finally, finally finished this second sock of the second pair that I knit for my Sockapalooza 4 pal, Dawn, who has been incredibly patient. I finished it over President's Day weekend. Back in August, I sent her a pair of summery socks and the first of this pair of Bayerische socks, with an IOU for the other one. I was so sure that I would have this second sock finished in time for cold-weather wearing.
Although it is still cold and snowing here in Albany (it's really been coming down for the past two days), however, my roommate (who is from Texas, where Dawn is) tells me that winter is over down south, and Texans have been enjoying 80-degree weather. Bummer, on two counts.
I love how these socks have turned out, even though they took me forever to finish. I don't know if I'll ever knit them again, though, even if I would love a pair for myself. And there are so many other sock patterns out there that I want to try knitting, and so little time!

Year Cake

What is more evocative of Chinese New Year than New Year cake, or nian gao? In the mornings or afternoons of the first few days of the New Year, as you're at home with family, or braving the cold to go visit relatives to greet the New Year with them, you will often find nian gao being fried up and served. Slightly sweet, slightly chewy, slightly melt-in-your-mouth, it is difficult to imagine a Chinese New Year without it.

These days, most people buy a round of nian gao from the supermarket, or a Chinese restaurant. At this time of year, they even serve it in the restaurants when you're having dim sum. Not all nian gao is made equal, however. Some manufacturers put in copious amounts of red dye (red being a lucky colour); I would avoid any pink- or red-looking cakes.

On Thursday, when I was calling all my aunts and uncles to wish them a happy New Year (it took over an hour and a half), one of my aunts suggested that I make my own nian gao, saying that it was very simple. Well, she told me how and, indeed, it sounded very simple.

Nian Gao recipe (provided by Hing-Yuk Lau Chan)

Ingredients (to make two rounds of nian gao):

1 lb glutinous rice flour
5 slabs of brown, rock candy sugar
3 Chinese rice bowls full of water (around 3.5 cups)

Make a light syrup by heating the water and sugar together in a saucepan until the sugar has melted. There is no need to reduce the liquid; this syrup is not meant to be thick.
Place the glutinous rice flour in a large bowl. Very gradually, add the syrup, mixing well after each addition. Aim to produce a smooth, lump-free batter. After all the syrup is added, it should resemble pancake batter.
Divide the batter evenly between two shallow, round containers that have been brushed with vegetable oil. I used 8-inch round baking pans. At this point, you can decorate the top with a dried, red date and/or some lotus seeds if you like. If you plan to cook the nian gao in the microwave, use glass or plastic containers. My aunt suggested that I use two takeout containers, the kind we often get from Chinese restaurants, and told me to cook the nian gao on the high setting in the microwave for around 8 minutes. Now, I don't know about you, but I have been trying to cut back on microwave usage, because I don't believe that it's healthy. In particular, I no longer put plastic containers in the microwave, so I wasn't about to zap my nian gao in plastic for a full 8 minutes! Either use a glass container, or do what I did, which is to use the more traditional method of steaming.

Make sure that there is plenty of water heating in your steaming vessel, because steaming takes much longer than microwaving! I used a wok with a metal rack set in the bottom to hold the pan above the water. Place your containers of nian gao batter into your steaming vessel and steam for 60-90 minutes. You'll want to check the water level once or twice, to make sure that you still have enough liquid. It pays to keep a kettle of hot water available, so you don't reduce the temperature of the steaming water too much when you add liquid.

You'll know that the nian gao is done when it has become slightly translucent, and there are no pale, batter-coloured patches left. If your nian gao isn't done after 8 minutes in the microwave, cook it for another 1 to 2 minutes.The top of the nian gao may have developed bubbles and become uneven while cooking. Brush the bottom of a large plate that fits into your pan/container with oil (or use the smooth bottom of a glass) and use it to press down on the top of your nian gao while it is still warm, to smooth it out. Cool the nian gao to room temperature, and then chill in the refrigerator overnight.Whether you're cooking your own nian gao, or nian gao you bought from the store, the process is the same. Slice your round of nian gao into pieces roughly 3/8-inch thick and approximately 2 1/2- by 2-inches in size. If your slices are too thick, the outside of your nian gao will burn before the inside heats properly.

In a bowl, lightly beat an egg. Heat a pan and add a little bit of oil. Dip each slice of nian gao in the beaten egg and place them in the pan. Pan fry for around 1 minute on each side, until the nian gao is heated through, develops a slight crust on the outside, and is soft and pliable, but still retains its shape. You don't have to dip the nian gao in egg if you are vegetarian. The egg just helps to prevent sticking.
Eat your nian gao while it is still hot and soft and chewy, but be careful not to burn your mouth! My roommate, and people at work, for whom I've made nian gao say it reminds them of french toast. I am happy to report that, although my round of nian gao wasn't as hard (think of a round of parmesan cheese) as what you buy from the store, it fried up beautifully and tasted great.

Happy Chinese New Year!!

Happy Chinese New Year! I wish you and your families good health, longevity, prosperity, success in all your endeavours, and fulfilment of your heart's desire. I haven't posted since last year, according to the western calendar, but I thought the lunar New Year would be a nice time to start again. I have a lot of catching up to do, since I haven't been idle, but I'm returning with a little series on Chinese New Year foods.

Chinese New Year is one of my favourite times of the year. You can get together with family, eat lots of good food, receive lucky money (!), and remember all the interesting and wonderful traditions that are part of the Chinese culture.

For example, in my family, we try to be vegetarian on the first day of the New Year. No doubt this practice has its origins in Buddhism and, although my family isn't Buddhist, we observe this tradition because it isn't such a huge sacrifice, especially when you have a wonderful vegetarian dish to look forward to!

At home, we just call this dish tsai, which means vegetarian food; at this time of year, it clearly refers to this one dish that Moocow and I look forward to. We usually end up making a huge wok-ful, because everyone in the house has some, and we can have more throughout the day, or the next few days. It is very simple to make, and nutritious as well. The most important thing is to have the right number of ingredients, and the right kinds.

During the lunar New Year, everything has to be lucky and auspicious. Red is a lucky colour, as are most even numbers (though not four, which sounds like the word for death!!). The numbers eight, nine, ten and thirteen, especially, are considered lucky, so we make sure that we have one of those numbers of ingredients in the tsai.

This year, I soaked some dried shiitake mushrooms and wood ear fungus, which are always featured in my family's version of this dish. I keep the shiitake water because it contains a lot of flavour, and can be used instead of chicken broth. The snow peas and carrots are for colour and sweetness.
At Moocow's suggestion, I also soaked some dried lily bulbs, which signify togetherness at this happy time of year. They, and the small, red dates, are also slightly sweet. I never actually eat the red dates, but I like how they look. When I brought the tsai in to work the other day, however, two people said that they liked them.
You'll also want to soak some vermicelli (also known as cellophane or mung bean noodles). Normally, we would also want to put in a fungus called fat choi, which seriously resembles hair. It adds a certain flavour to the dish, and is very lucky because it sounds a lot like the word for prosperity. However, in recent years I've learned that this particular species may have been overharvested. It has become more difficult to acquire, and I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for driving it to extinction, so I didn't use any.
Clean some napa cabbage and cut it into bite-sized pieces. You should cut them slightly larger than you would expect, because they shrink a little as they cook. Then, one of my favourites, is the dried tofu skin. You buy it in packages, and they're hard, brittle spears that you need to soak for a while (at least an hour), otherwise they won't cook properly. After they've soaked and softened, you can cut them into bite-sized pieces.

So, have you been counting? I had nine ingredients in my tsai this year. You can also put in peeled and sliced rounds of lotus root, sugar snap peas, snow fungus, or even dried oysters (soaked). "Dried oysters!" you might say. Yes, they aren't vegetarian. Somehow, though, they are kosher for this dish. Why? Well, my father had a story about how the Buddha called all the animals to a meeting (perhaps it was the one to invite them to the New Year's banquet, which decided their order in the Chinese zodiac) and, while he was talking, he had his staff in a pool of water. When he was finished and lifted his staff to leave, he found that some oysters had attached to it. This made the oysters "clean" and special in some way. I'm still not sure how it makes it all right to eat them, but there you go.

So, heat some oil in the wok and put in a couple of slices of peeled ginger. Then, stir-fry the carrots and snow peas and the wood ear fungus with a little bit of salt. This helps to keep the colours nice and bright. Don't stir-fry the shiitake mushrooms, though, because they can become tough. Set aside the carrots and snow peas. In the wok, with the wood ear fungs and ginger, add the napa cabbage, shiitake mushroom and tofu skin. Add a little bit of salt and some soy sauce and cook over medium heat until the napa cabbage is tender. The cabbage should release quite a bit of liquid as it cooks, but you may need to add water. If you have the water from soaking the shiitake mushrooms, use that.

Once the napa cabbage and tofu skin are cooked to your liking, add the red dates and lily bulb. Cook for a minute or two. At this point, I adjust the seasonings a little, with salt, soy sauce, a little bit of sugar, and white pepper. Then, add the vermicelli and mix it into the other ingredients well. You will probably need to add liquid in at this point. The vermicelli cooks quickly, so cook for just another three or four minutes. Taste, and adjust seasonings again, if it's necessary. At the end, add the snow peas and carrots back in and mix it all together. By this point, it's probably a huge wok full of food, and will give you quite a workout!

Serve it nice and hot, either on its own, or with rice. This is a dish that keeps well for a couple of days in the refrigerator. When you reheat it, either in a pot or in the microwave, be sure to add a little liquid. If you reheat it by steaming, that won't be necessary.

Desserts at work

I started my externship at a major hotel in town back in September. The first few months were spent simply figuring out where everything was, trying not to make too many disastrous mistakes, and trying to work as efficiently as possible. All this was especially challenging as I started right at the beginning of the holiday rush and because we suddenly became understaffed in October when we lost a team member. While I haven't had much time to blog, I've been taking some pictures along the way. Now that things have slowed down a bit, thought I would share.

Yesterday afternoon at 3:00 we got a call from the restaurant manager asking for a custom chocolate birthday cake for a dinner guest. With a banquet of 400 arriving that evening and preparation for Restaurant Week madness to complete as well, no one really had the time to make a custom cake on such short notice. As I had been asking to be allowed to make and decorate a cake, the chef asked me to take care of this request. Luckily we make lots of cakes in frames - metal frames that one places inside a sheet pan and cake batter, mousse batter, etc., gets smoothed into it. The result is a large cake rectangle that can be cut as desired. Usually we cut them into 2"x2" squares for mini pastries, but on occasions like this, we just take whatever we need. This cake has a chocolate sponge base, a caramel mousse layer, and a chocolate mousse layer. All I really had to do was cut the cake, spray it with chocolate spray (thus the velvety look to the surface), and stick some chocolate shards in it, but it was still fun to get to decide how to dress up a dark rectangle! The guest ended up sending his compliments to the chef, saying that it was the best cake he'd ever had. Even though I had nothing to do with making the cake itself, it was still nice to know that one of our desserts made a guest happy.

The three desserts shown below were made for the New Year's Eve menu at the hotel. I think the chocolate box (also sprayed) was filled with a tropical fruit or raspberry mousse...can't remember now. The macaroon was filled with a silky dark chocolate ganache, and the exotic-looking ball is a solid ball of crunchy meringue on the top half, vanilla ice cream on the bottom half, and a chocolate ice cream core. Oh, and there was coconut sprinkled on top of the meringue.

Butternut Squash Risotto

Risotto is one of my favourite comfort foods. It's something about the slow, gentle cooking over a stove. The smooth, creamy texture and satisfying starchiness (I love rice!), as well as all the endless variations, make it difficult to resist.

I haven't cooked much (and have really been eating rather poorly) for the past two weeks. The other day, I stayed up until 5 a.m. grading exams. Serves me right for writing a 13 page final! But today, with my Statistics paper out of the way, and just one more exam to go, I decided to indulge my craving to try this recipe from Cook's Illustrated. It really wasn't difficult, especially since I skipped the step where I heat the chicken broth with the seeds and string of the squash.

It turned out a little darker than I'd expected. Somehow, the organic chicken broth I bought was rather dark in colour. It may not be photogenic, but oh, it tasted so good! The flavour of the squash was enhanced with a pinch of nutmeg, some sage, and a sprinkling of parmesan. Now, if only I had a bit of tiramisu for dessert.....

A stab at bread

About three weeks ago, I made my first stab at bread outside of pizza dough. It was also the first real bread I made that wasn't an inedible brick. And all the better that it was cinnamon swirl bread. It was so good, I made the recipe twice more.

The original recipe called for 8 cups of flour - something impossible to do in the average Hong Kong kitchen. Cutting it down to a manageable 2 or 3 cups required some tricky math and futzing around with the measurements: I need a little more water to proof the yeast, so a little less milk to balance it out? And I can't do 66.6% of an egg. Throw the whole egg in, and use a little more flour? I'm not really sure if I did the right thing, as the science of baking is a complete mystery to me. I also have little idea whether my substitution of ordinary plain flour for bread flour (the latter being expensive in Hong Kong), and vegetable oil for butter (trying to avoid saturated fats) made any real difference. The recipe also called for scalded milk. I don't know why this would be different from unboiled milk. Oh well, just do what it says.

But it did rise, it wasn't rock hard, and it tasted pretty good. The loaf just looks rather flat in the photo because my baking tin was too large. I knew a guy in college who routinely made bread without the benefit of a recipe. He just threw things together until they kneaded up roughly at the right consistency. It worked.

The first attempt was a bit thin on the filling. It said to just sprinkle a lot of cinnamon sugar and a few drops of water on the rolled-out dough and roll it up. I guess I didn't use enough.

The next time, I over-compensated by adding raisins, little chunks of apple, and apple sauce (which I have to make myself - you can't buy it here except in ridiculously tiny baby food jars), but there must have been too much moisture because the bread came out a bit doughy.

The third time, I eliminated the apple and apple products, used a lot more cinnamon sugar, and kept the raisins. And the imaginary Goldilocks looking over my shoulder, that picky picky girl, smiled in satisfaction.

Tis the Season!

Yes, I do know how to make more than food, although lately I've been worried that I've gotten rusty at doing other things. Our Final Buffet was this weekend, and although we're not totally done with pastry school yet, we won't be cooking nearly as much from now on. (I'm not putting the pictures up here, since there are too many, but here is the link to the album.) Even better, we don't have any more long homework assignments, woohoo!!! The first order of the day was to get ready for Christmas, and with that, I headed off to Target to buy the shortest length of tree lights that I could find - 12 feet for around $2.00. As for the tree, our apartment is tiny, so we had to find an accordingly tiny specimen. For all the apartment dwellers out there, you'll understand how hard it is to find a real tree that's under 4 feet tall. In past years we've made do with a tabletop balsam tree from LLBean that costs $80, but this year we got lucky. You'll never guess where I found this little guy......Whole Foods, for only $25! Whole Foods calls it a "tabletop" tree, too, but they must have a huge table in mind. Doesn't it look perfect our little corner here? Even better, this tree reminds me of the scrawny, lovable little shrub in "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

Aside from getting the tree set up, I managed to get started on some stocking stuffers for the holidays, too.
This duo is going to work hard at looking cute on someone's refrigerator this holiday. Here they are going for a practice run on our fridge.

Another Day, Another Attempt

I've pretty much eaten my way through the last of the CSA produce. I do, however, still have onions and potatoes. I've been saving these lovely fingering potatoes for various things, one of which was another attempt to reproduce those Indian-style potatoes that I ate at a friend's house a couple of years ago. This time I followed a recipe from Lord Krishna's Cuisine. Having learnt from my experience with her palak paneer recipe, I added some garlic and increased the amount of spices a bit.
This time it seemed a little closer to the flavour I remember. I have one more recipe I'm going to try. It's from a south Indian cookbook (my friend is south Indian). Maybe some combination of these recipes will reproduce it. This was tonight's dinner, by the way. Spicy potatoes, chicken with whole spices in a yogurt sauce, and some saag paneer I had made for the biology graduate student Turk'y (not real turkey) party.

New Shower Curtain

At last, I found time to finish the shower curtain, which has been sitting around half-complete for months now (that's why there are all those wrinkles). W and I picked out the brown brocade to go with our 1950's style, pink formica sink counter. The previous tenants had gone for a pink and green colour scheme (I still need to replace those green blinds!), but we decided on brown and pink. It reminds me of chocolate sundaes and other chocolaty delights.

See the date on that photo? It was September when I was sewing it up and pinking the raw edges. For many weeks I was trying to find the right shade of metal grommet, buying and returning several times. After an aborted attempt to actually put in the grommets (not enough layers of fabric, or fabric too thin), I let it sit a couple more weeks before I finally went with simple buttonholes.

I had to stick some pink satin at the top, because they were don't to the last few yards of the bolt of fabric, and I didn't have enough for the curtain. I think it turned out rather well, though, don't you?

Seeing What the Fuss is About

I was browsing magazines at the bookstore when it happened for the first time. I picked up a copy of that little publication put out by the Martha Stewart franchise, Everyday Food, and I was curious. Now, I've heard that MS's regular recipes can be very involved, and the idea is cooking for entertaining. Since I don't really have the time, or space, to entertain in great numbers, her recipes have never really interested me. But the recipes in Everyday Food did, indeed, look more like something I would attempt for less exalted occasions.

Of course, she has her own home furnishing, kitchenware and bakeware lines at Macy's and Kmart, she has numerous books and periodicals to her name, and she has become rather notorious. But I just wanted to see what the hype is all about. Do her recipes work, do they taste good, and are they worth the time? Of course, I know it's her Everyday Food team that actually works on the recipes for that little magazine, but I've managed to collect three issues now: one for October, one for Thanksgiving/November, and one special holiday issue with a lot of baked goods.

I had leftover pumpkin puree from making the pumpkin pie, so I decided to try the Penne with Creamy Pumpkin Sauce. It was just me, so I quartered the portions. I also had to substitute fresh rosemary for thyme, because my rosemary just hasn't been growing since I brought it indoors. And I may have substituted light cream for heavy cream. So maybe that accounts for the less than amazing results. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't wonderful. I guess I'll have to find another use for unused pumpkin puree!

Quinoa

It's been about a month since I decided to start experimenting with whole grains. Chinese people eat a lot of white rice, which really isn't that good for you. I borrowed Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way, by Lorna Sass, from the library, and I'm going to try out different whole grains to see what they taste like and whether they're easy to prepare. If all goes well, when I go visit my parents over New Year's, I will introduce them to whole grains.

I took W on her first trip to the local co-op, and I stocked up on some quinoa, amaranth, wheat berries and steel cut oats. It's always fun going to the co-op. Quinoa [keen-wa] looked relatively easy to prepare, so I chose a recipe for which I had most of the ingredients, which happened to be the chile-scented pork chops with roasted red pepper dressing.

I overcooked the quinoa, I think, and I didn't have a strainer with sufficiently fine mesh (which may have been part of the overcooking problem), so I had some runaways. You have to be sure to rinse the quinoa thoroughly before you cook it (I forgot, and dumped it into my pot of boiling water, so I had to drain it and start again) because it has natural saponins in its bran layer, which taste bitter. After it's cooked, quinoa has a faintly vegetal aroma (it reminds me a bit of some Chinese herbs), but I didn't find it unpleasant.

I got a whole lot of quinoa, though, so I'm going to continue experimenting. There's even a recipe for a ginger quinoa cake in the book!

Taking Care of (Leek) Business

What does one do with bags of leeks? I like them, otherwise I wouldn't have taken so many at the CSA, but I wanted to try something different from what I had been doing so far, which was potato leek soup (though I did make some of that, too) or lemon-dill fish fillets with leek greens.
I bought some gruyere cheese and a frozen pie crust, and whipped up this leek pie in short order. But it tasted really good; it must be all the cheese! And, since I was feeling a little guilty about said cheese, I paired it up with a healthy basil (from my little windowsill basil plant) and cherry tomato salad.
And, because it was so good, I made shepherd's pie again.
It went into the fridge, so I could eat it throughout the week. I gave some of the leek pie and shepherd's pie to a coworker at the Japanese restaurant. He's a rather notorious for being, if not a picky eater, than something of a gourmet. Perhaps he was being polite, but it was all compliments from him! Ah, the magic of cheese and butter!
And, as I've said before, I see nothing wrong with eating the green portion of the leek. In fact, I believe the French (great leek eaters) do so regularly.
This time, I just stir-fried them into some fried rice, instead of onions or scallions. They weren't tough or fibrous at all.

I'm all out of leeks from the CSA now. I guess it's back to buying vegetables from the supermarket for me.

Sock Saviour Revealed

Was there ever a more undeserving sock pal than I? I was so disappointed when my Sockapalooza sock pal went AWOL, but Aunti MiMi become my sock saviour and has e-mailed me and kept me apprised of her progress. Then what do I do? It's been a couple of days since I received the incredible package my sock saviour sent me, exams (Remote Sensing - it's quite a challenge trying to identify man made structures and natural phenomena from satellite images), problem sets (remote sensing and statistics) grading, grading and more grading (I never though I'd be pulling all-nighters to get grading completed!) have sapped me of a lot of energy. I wanted to take some nice pictures and write a decent post to do these socks justice because they are simply gorgeous!

My sock saviour, Aunti MiMi, who lives in Minnesota, knit these socks from Fleece Artist Merino. It's hard to believe that there isn't even a smidgen of silk in the yarn, it's so silky and soft. It even has a beautiful sheen to it. And I couldn't have chosen a better colourway myself! It's a subtly variegated red, and red socks are so snazzy!

But MiMi didn't stop there! She sent me something else guaranteed to take my breath away! The cutest little bowl (I'm thinking condiments, tiny dishes of Japanese-style appetizers, and stitch markers) made by a potter/knitter in Minnesota, Jennie E. Lanners. Now that I've seen - and touched - her work, I'm not sure how I will control myself. Did you see the ball of pink yarn unraveling at the bottom of the bowl?

A lovely card, with a picture of some seriously sexy yarn, two delicious-smelling almond oatmeal soaps, and some hand-dyed yarn from Minnesota. It has all the colours that I've been especially fond of recently: powder pink, baby pink, pistachio, apple cream, sea foam green. It's too much! So much more than I had been expecting, and I love it all. You're the most wonderful sock saviour, and your socks were more than worth waiting for. Thank you, Michelle!

Sewing Inspiration

First Kea sews some spectacular, spontaneous quilted cushion covers. Then, I come across a wonderful sewing blog, Sew, Mama, Sew!, that is currently doing a 30-day series on little sewing gifts, with links to fabulous tutorials and other crafty sewing blogs. I'm sure Moocow will be interested in the lunch bags, and there is an excellent tutorial for a quilted fabric wallet that I would really like to try my hand at.

So, if you like sewing, crafts, cute things, or just superb craftsmanship, head on over!

Cake decorating week

We had Colette Peters, a well-known cake decorator, come spend two days with us and show us a few of her tricks. We got to decorate one cake each, using styrofoam as a base in place of real cake. Here's my cake.
I think it looks like it could be from a Dr. Seuss on Easter book. Everything, even down to the candle, is made of icing fondant. And before you go, "Ewww, fondant!" we used a high-quality fondant that actually tasted very good. I used to hate the very mention of fondant. When I came across it on wedding cakes, I would invariably peel off the stuff before taking a timid bite of the cake, which usually tasted equally gross. Turns out that all those cakes had been made with poor quality fondant. It guess it shouldn't have been a surprise then that the cake itself never tasted too good either. In any case, there is delicious fondant out there, so keep an open mind next time you see it on your plate!

This was my favorite cake from the class, again from the person who made the avocado chicken egg. Her pineapple-themed cake was topped with a ring of fondant that was torched to create what looked like a slice of roasted pineapple. Even Colette was impressed; she'd never seen or heard of fondant being torched. So if you guys see torched fondant somewhere in the future, remember you saw it here first!
Colette also taught us how to make various flowers using gum paste. Here's a peony I made out of gum paste. The aluminum foil is there to hold up the petals so the flower dries in the right shape.
Some dogwood flowers....
And a little gum paste bouquet...

Scrap cushion covers

These maddeningly cheerful couch cushion covers are patchwork in the old sense, in that they're actually made of recycled scraps. The lining and backing are old Boyfriend t-shirts, the floral patterned squares are leftovers from one of my mom's sewing projects, and the plaid - well, you probably don't want to know.

I know it's just squares and rectangles, it's still the most complicated thing I've done in terms of quilting so far. I've always found that one of the most enjoyable aspects of sewing is the geometry, one of the few things I actually liked about high school maths. I think curved lines would be too fiddly for me, but next time I might tackle triangles. It'll be an excuse for me to re-learn my trigonometry.

Donut Muffins Revisited

(Hopefully I get this right this time...)

You gals are on such a roll with all your amazing home-cooked (or school-cooked?) dishes! I'm going to backtrack a bit back to one of Moocow's posts from this summer when she shared her donut muffin experience. Soon after she sent me the recipe (which I have since found online, so I think it's okay to link: muffin recipe and interesting accompanying article), I bought a muffin baking pan. Months pass without it being used. Then a couple of weeks ago at the farmer's market, a bakery stall was selling something similar, which reminded me of the recipe. Cinnamon, fall, baking... those just kind of go together, don't you think? It was time to make the muffins.


Filling the muffin cups with batter


Baked and ready to be dipped


Post-dip


Mmmmmm.

Now, this was the largest recipe I've ever followed. I mean, six cups of flour?! I've never had to deal with more than three. And all that butter, whoa. But instead of halving everything, I prepared the muffin batter to the fullest and chilled half for later. The muffin was very dense, but cakey and crumbly and could still hold up to a fork cutting through it. I brought some over to a pumpking carving party the next day and was instantly asked for the recipe. This is one for my recipe library.