Recent content by Eachna

Both baked and steamed cakes with bits of fruit in them are "fruit cakes". They are not the same thing but they're from the same family. HOWEVER... to be clear, I made Mad Cook's _fruitcake_ recipe and aged it for two weeks. I bought a bottle of rum to flavor it. As suggested, I used a...

Garlic and other members of the onion family are toxic to cats as well. Horses (as already mentioned) can eat garlic.

It sounds like you're talking about either cocoa, or unsweetened Baker's chocolate. Cocoa comes in a powder and you need to add sugar and some sort of fat (usually butter) to it. Baker's chocolate used to come in small squares that were wrapped in wax paper. It has the fat, but little or no...

I made popovers today in my convection microwave. It's been a few years since i successfully made them and so I did a "test" run in my regular oven to iron out the details. Other than putting too much butter in each cup of the pan (it puddled and flattened out the popovers) the oven run went...

The way I do it is to mix batter for a 10" cheesecake, and then crumb my 8" pan by accident :D.

Amazon exists in a technical sense (they will ship things here) but... Shipping is exorbitant. Trying to buy a $50 cast iron pan was $400 in shipping. Granted, that's an extreme example (all that heavy iron), but even "light" stuff is in the $20-$50 range. Spending $30 to ship a $20 item just...

I know it's a little tacky to reply to my own post, but I just returned from a walk to the shops and was semi-successful. No suet but that's a longer trip. I found: Mixed spice, which I think is what I would call "apple pie spice". It's just a mixed blend of dessert spices (cloves, cinnamon...

Thank you for the youtube link, it was awesome! I watched it multiple times to get a feel for things. I noticed a couple of things. When Gordon tied the string around the basin, he tied it at the absolute widest part, even though it had a little lip/extended edge around the outside. I would...

As it's being given to you, it's kind of inconvenient. There's a reason the butcher isn't bothering to package it up and sell it to people. You can use it to fatten very lean meats. If you mix it with breadcrumbs, mashed potatoes, or rice, you can turn it into a kind of meatloaf or meatballs...

First things first...talk with other local cooks about what they make. Take a look at food stalls in local markets. With that source of ideas out of the way... 1) Make your own dumplings. Dumplings can be steamed, boiled, or fried and each way is a different taste/texture. Dumplings include...

Before I forget...thank you to EVERYONE who answered. My mother in law doesn't like me because I'm American, and she won't do anything positive for my husband if it might benefit me. So, he can't ask her for her recipes because she _knows_ I'll be the one cooking/baking them. She doesn't care...

I'm American and my husband is Australian. My husband loves fruitcake. I loathe it and find it somewhat incomprehensible. However, he is incapable of finding a commercial version of a fruitcake that he likes. I tried asking my Mother-in-Law for her recipe, but she's refused to share it. All I...

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to make the pear crisp. I haven't made a crisp in a while. We have some vanilla ice cream in the freezer, and I'll make a ginger syrup that my son and I can put on the ice cream, and my husband can avoid. The upside-down pear gingerbread cake sounded...

Today I baked the worst dried fruit pie, ever! I couldn't roll the crust out properly. Instead of wax paper, my husband had purchased "baking paper" (which isn't parchment paper, and isn't wax paper, and shreds like the dickens). I was out of plastic wrap, and my counters are too old and nasty...

I have a tray of ice cubes of ginger syrup in the freezer (made when I candied some ginger). I also have 6 pears and about a pound of chopped walnuts. I want to use them for a dessert. No idea _what_ dessert though. I'd like it to have a fairly mild ginger flavor as my husband doesn't like...