use real butter

Recipe: red beans and rice

I’m not sure how authentic this recipe is or not, but I love making a big batch. It heats up wonderfully for lunch or dinner (or brekkie – yeah, I do that sometimes). Despite how much I love to cook, there are times when it’s so nice to reach into the fridge and spoon some food from a tupperware onto a plate and nuke it up just like that. Jeremy and I are both fans of leftovers because it’s economical and delicious. Jeremy likes his red beans and rice as is (are?) and I like mine with some extra Tabasco… I mean a lot of extra Tabasco.

Recipe: almond toffee

We didn’t get around to making toffee during my pastry skills class. I just remembered Chef Shan shouting, “and if you add cream to this, you end up with toffee!” Toward the end of the ten weeks, I asked him for a toffee recipe and he said he couldn’t give the secret recipe away. Okay, I understand – confectioner’s secret. Chef Will was the same way with his toffee recipe. I watched his perfectly square blocks of gorgeous toffee while he demonstrated tempering to the professional pastry students.

I looked online, looked in books, looked online some more and settled on a recipe in Candymaking (Kendrick and Atkinson) to begin my foray into toffee today.

Recipe: lime cake

I had originally planned to make petits fours with a full sheet of the chiffon cake yesterday, but after the first half made me so bloody crazy, I bailed on the idea of more petits fours. Instead, I looked at the leftover cake, the leftover buttercream, leftover lime syrup, pulled a jar of opened lemon curd from the refrigerator (thanks Sam!) and threw together a lime-lemon cake of sorts. I’m playing out the different permutations of cake, buttercream, syrup, and jam/curds and writing up the successful combinations in my quadrille notebook. It’s nice to be able to experiment instead of trying something new whenever we entertain – that’s just a little more stress than I need in a day.

I assembled the cake last night and thought about garnishing. I’ve candied lemon slices before and they are beautiful and delicious. Not so with lime slices. The lovely green becomes a most unappealing brownish green when candied. I shouldn’t care, but… the OCD color-loving parrot in me can’t do with brown-green. Sleep on it, right? I did and I thought a flash dip in hard crack stage sugar might work. Instead, I got a green-brown lime slice that fell out of it’s candy shell and dripped lime juice everywhere. Amidst my mess of wax paper, cooling racks, crystalizing sugar, and slaughtered limes, I just settled on raw slices and some spun sugar (about all that could be salvaged from the sugar).

**Jump for more butter**