Very popular in South China to serve to the guests as a snack during the Chinese New Year. It is so named because the round dough balls, when deep fried, will crack open like someone laughing. It carries a meaning of being able to laugh throughout the year.
So that people who avoid alcohol could still enjoy the extraordinarily moist yet soft texture of my Grand Marnier cake, I've adapted the recipe using ground almonds and lemon.
What This Recipe Shows: By rolling the dough balls in plain sugar first, the confectioners sugar does not soak in so much and stays on the surface better.
Get the leavening right and you'll have lighter, finer textured cakes.
Wedges of these spicy kulchas are great as an appetizer with any legume curry. Of course they are best when they are hot off the grill, but you can make a batch ahead of time; wrap them in foil and rewarm them in a preheated 300ºF oven for about 10 minutes. Like many of the Indian flatbreads, this freezes very well for up to 2 months.
Use this Orange Flower Cake as a blueprint for other citrus cakes. Serve it plain, with a dusting if confectioners sugar, or poke the top with holes and saturate it with a tart glaze as follows.
This is very rich and sweet, almost more of a pudding than a cake. It first appeared in the Fifties, but was still popular a decade later. My husband, who is not usually a dessert eater, said that it is "extremely good!".
This is an easy-to-make crust that is flaky and tender and tastes like butter. The butter is pared down to what I consider to be the minimum amount possible. The flour/butter mixture is chilled midway through the process so that when the dough is rolled, the hard butter forms flat sheets, increasing the flakiness of the dough. Some of the usual butter is replaced with sour cream, which has less fat and calories but adds to the tenderness and richness of the crust. A pinch of baking powder adds a degree of lightening.
This tender, buttery cake is based on the Marble Gugelhupf at Demel in Vienna, although I've added baking powder to give it the lighter crumb Americans prefer.
The secret of these sensationally light biscuits is the steam produced by a moist dough and baking the biscuits up against each other.