I’ve decided that I will be making two pies a year from now on, the Brandied Butternut Squash Pie from the peerless Melissa Clark that I made for Thanksgiving last year and this apple pie for July 4th. (I don’t think pies count as “massive.”) While I’ve made apple pies in the past, and I liked them okay, there were problems:
1. The apples always seemed to be partly raw.
2. The crust tended to be soggy on the bottom.
But in spite of these drawbacks I wanted to make an apple pie sometime during the July 4th weekend. This desire was mainly fired by a Sally’s Baking Addiction post in which she demonstrated how
As I’ve been working on the chapter on bread in my planned forthcoming cookbook (when it will come forth is very much an open question), I got inspired to make a bread-machine loaf, something I don’t usually do. My breadmaking usually falls into much more controllable territory–rolls, pizza dough, breadsticks, and overnight bread baked as a round. I don’t have to worry about whether or not rolls are going to cave in, as they are baked outside of the machine. I can eyeball how far they’ve risen and adjust accordingly. But a big loaf is inherently much more unstable, and you can’t tweak the machine’s cycle after it has started. Here it is, though. I was reminded of a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, in which the orphan Rose is raised by her Uncle Alec. She takes housekeeping lessons from one of her aunts as a part of her education, and here’s how her baking lessons come out:
Here I sit in Kansas City, Missouri, well after the events I described in my last post: the post-concert reception and the dinner for the annual business meeting. So I’ll give you a quick update and then a great, simple frosting recipe that you can use in the place of that horrible powdered-sugar stuff. I’ll be doing an exhaustive (and exhausting) recipe and variations for my streamlined Swiss buttercream, but that will have to wait.
We always have a special dinner around December 30 to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday, and for a number of years I made my special double-the-meat double-the-cheese lasagna with cheesecake for dessert. Then I moved over to prime rib. This year, due to my being so impressed with the beef tenderloin served at our church’s Christmas dinner, I switched to that. I have to say that I’ll almost certainly never go back to prime rib. The tenderloin is cheaper (around $11.99/pound at Costco), cooks faster, and has wonderful flavor and tenderness.