Baked goods do something peculiar when boiled with milk: they dissolve and become stretchy and elastic. Throw the mixture into a blender, and this strange concoction becomes velvety and thick, like pudding. I first encountered this magic trick at a restaurant full of them, called Alinea. There, a pudding made by boiling brioche and cream was served with raspberries for an elegant “toast-and-jam” bite. Since then, I’ve applied the same principle to just about every other kind of bakery treat I can get my hands on—like gingerbread or devil’s food cake. Most recently, I’ve been reducing glazed donuts to a velvety pudding to flavor ice cream.
When it came time for Dan, my main squeeze, to celebrate his mother’s birthday, he made it clear that she wasn’t a cake person. Lucky for me, Holli is an ice cream person, and a popcorn lover as well, so I set myself to the task of making a buttered popcorn ice cream for her birthday. This was my first chance to make an impression on her, and I was determined it be a delicious one.
Meringue pie can be tricky to prepare. We figure out how to make a perfect lemon meringue pie with a sky-high topping that doesn't weep.
I started thinking about about the waste from coffee because in a restaurant people drink a lot of coffee; you can end up throwing away a lot of coffee grounds. We decided to start cooking with used coffee grounds, and the dishes we came up with tasted just as good - with a rich dark coffee - as they would have using fresh coffee grounds. Just store the ground in the refrigerator in a sealed plastic container with enough space for air circulation.
Though we claim to be rhubarb purists as our grandmother was, we do believe it pairs very well with tart raspberries.
No need to chop the peanuts here–you want them in the mix all nice and chunky. The mixer should break them up just enough.
English chef Gill Meyer's love of rye flour shows up all over his book Gather, but this recipe, paired with chocolate and fresh bay leaves is deliciously haunting.
We found that we could pile the crumb topping high on this cake—just like they do in Jersey—by paying special attention to the types of flour and sugar we used in each layer.
Thin and crisp with a cinnamon-sugar sprinkle, these are a cross between Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal and supermarket graham crackers. Unlike store-bought ones, these are a hundred percent whole grain.