Pineapple Cake!

I had some leftover pineapple slices, so I decided to make an upside down cake. I don't know anything else to do with a pineapple. You will need a spring form pan.

1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups greek yogurt

some pineapple slices
brown sugar
a dab of butter

Pre heat the oven to 350.

Beat the butter, sugar, and vanilla until light colored and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Put all the dry ingredients in a sifter, and add one half at a time to the batter, alternating with yogurt.  Mix thoroughly after each addition.

Assemble your pan, then put about 1/3 cup of brown sugar and a dab of butter in it. Add a couple teaspoons of water. Turn a burner on medium, and then carefully melt the butter & sugar together, stirring to prevent burning. When the sugar is mostly melted, remove from heat and swirl to coat the bottom of the pan.

Cover the sugar with a layer of pineapple slices then pour in the batter. Gently thump the pan on the counter a couple times to shake out any big air bubbles. Place the pan on a cookie sheet, because it will leak. Bake for an hour and a half, approximately.

1. Yes, it really did take me 90 minutes to cook this. I turned the pan around once in the middle because my oven pretty much sucks.
2. The original recipe is for a sour cream coffee cake. So you could use that instead, but greek yogurt sure did the trick.
3. Maybe this is what I needed to use those plums for. I bet it would be delicious.
4. I used fresh pineapple, but I'm sure canned would be just as good.
5. I also didn't have any maraschino cherries, which I think are very important to a pineapple upside down cake. It just isn't the same without them.

I have no idea how people managed to make cakes before the invention of electric mixers. I paid 6$ for a used one at goodwill. It's a piece of crap, but it has made a batch of Mexican wedding cookies, a tart crust, and this cake this month and it was worth every one of those 600 pennies. This cake wouldn't have been half as good without it, because inflating the batter with minute air bubbles is one of the things that makes a proper cake.

This isn't perfect, but it's still very good cake. It stayed moist even after an hour and a half in the oven, and is neither too rich nor too rubbery. If you hate maraschino cherries though, at least have some ice cream with it.

Plum Tart

This is the third or fourth time I've used this crust recipe, and I've been trying to figure out if there's any reason not to use powdered sugar instead of regular. I don't think there is, but so far I haven't tried it.

These plums were growing in the yard of the vacant house next door to my sister. They're pretty good plums for cooking, not too sweet or too juicy. I made the crust as for for the jam tart pretty much exactly, but then put in a layer of sliced plums instead of jam, sprinkled a spoon or two of sugar on them, and skipped the marzipan.

I should have cooked it for a few more minutes, but the plums came out perfect. They got soft but not mushy, and were the perfect balance of sweet and tart. A little plum juice ran out and made the crumbs slightly fruity and cakey, and the almonds gave it crunch. I might have to get some more plums from the abandoned house before they all fall off the tree.

Tiffin!

I always have to say it like Timmy from the Simpsons says Timmy!

Tiffin!Tiffin!

It looks boring as hell. I can't remember what made me look up a recipe, and once I made some I didn't even want to take a picture of it. It has such a loyal following that I thought well whattahell, it can't be all that great.

But it kinda is. It's like if a Kit Kat bar was really as good as the TV ads say it is. But more like the graham cracker pie crust of the gods. With chocolate. It's definitely not cake, or a cookie, and you wouldn't say it was candy either.

8 oz TJ's lemon wafer cookies, the ones with chocolate drizzles
1/3 cup yellow raisins, optional. If you do without, add another handful of cookies.
1/3 cup butter
4 T cocoa powder
3 T syrup
2 T sugar

about 4 or 5 oz of chocolate

Smash up the cookies. Don't totally powder them, there ought to be a few pea-sized bits left. Add the cocoa powder and raisins.

In a small sauce pan, heat the butter, sugar, & syrup. Bring to a gentle boil for about 5 minutes, then pour over the rest of the ingredients. Toss everything together until thoroughly combined, then press the mix into a cake pan. Melt the chocolate. Pour it over the mix and swirl the pan around to create an even layer on top. Cool the tiffin in the fridge, then break or cut it into candy bar sized pieces.

Notes:

1. Traditionally, you are supposed to use a mild, dry, not very rich cookie for this. But i really like those lemon things.
2. Also, authentic recipes will call for 'golden syrup' which I think is very similar to pancake syrup, but I've never had any so I don't know. I used some scandinavian baking syrup I got at ikea.
3. Lastly, the recipe I based this on called for half dark and half milk chocolate, melted and mixed together. So I just used semi sweet baking chips.

Dang this stuff was good. The lemon cookies are very crispy, but not hard, and the raisins make little tart, chewy fruity spots that bring out the lemon flavor. I used only one kind of chocolate, but it now occurs to me that if I had used half dark and half milk chocolate, I could have given it a marbled top instead of mixing the two together. It would have looked fancier, and maybe I'd have taken a picture.

Jam Tart

  

 

The filling is just a layer of store bought jam, so there's nothing amazing about that, but the crust is quite remarkable.

3/4 cups butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups flour (about 200 grams)
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
sliced almonds
jam

optional: 1/3 cup marzipan

Pre heat the oven to 350.

Cream the butter & sugar with the salt & almond extract until the mixture is fluffy and light colored and the sugar grains are dissolved. Gently mix in the flour. Put 1/2 cup of the dough in a bowl in the freezer to stiffen up. Press the rest of the pastry into a tart pan; be sure to make the crust as even a thickness as possible. Spread a thin layer of jam over the crust. Take the reserved crust out of the freezer. If you're using marzipan, use a pastry cutter to combine it slightly with the reserved dough. Break the mixture into crumbs and sprinkle it over the jam, then add a few almond slices. Bake until the crust is lightly browned, 40 to 50 minutes.

1. I over cooked mine. I didn't want it as brown as the picture. It was also a smidge tough.
2. The original recipe says to use a 9" pan. Mine is bigger than that, which is why I decided to use a little marzipan in the topping to spread it out a little.
3. Real butter. Not margarine. Not shortening.
4. Do not skimp during the part about 'cream butter & sugar until fluffy'. This is all-important!
5. I used blackberry jam, but I bet it would be really good with marmalade, or figs, or plum jam.

This crust is both amazing and very strange. Essentially what you do is make a buttercream frosting, then mix in enough flour to make a kind of heavy spackle which you then coat the inside of your pan with. Conventional pastry has a tendency to shrink and toughen when it is cooked, but this stuff does not shrink, and at least when it isn't overcooked, stays tender and shortbready. I suspect that the reason for the lack of shrinkage is the fact that when you cream the butter & sugar, what you're doing is whipping minute bubbles into the fat. It takes quite a long time if you do this by hand, but the result is unlike anything else. The air bubbles expand in the oven, and since there is no added liquid in the recipe to evaporate out and cause shrinking, the crust retains its size and shape as it solidifies.

I used this crust recipe for a quarkkuchen a little later, with a little vanilla and lemon zest, and it was fantastic.

Chocolate Cheese Cake

  

  
Jej mades a mighty delicious chocolate cheesecake. This is not exactly the recipe she used, because she has an even harder time following a recipe than I do, but we started with the same source material, and I added cocoa powder the same as she did. You will need a springform baking pan.

Pre heat the oven to 325.

crust:

2 cups peanut butter cookie crumbs
1/4 cup butter

Grind the cookies to a powder and put them in a microwavable bowl with the butter. Zap it for about 30 seconds, then mix the butter and crumbs thoroughly.  Press the mixture into the bottom of your pan and up the sides about an inch. Set aside.

Filling:

2, 8-oz things of cream cheese
3 eggs
1 cup sugar
2 cups greek yogurt
1/4 cup cocoa powder
teaspoon vanilla extract

If you have a food processor that is big enough to do the whole recipe at once, put everything in it and process it until it's smooth. (I don't have such a thing, but I do have a blender, which worked but was not too happy about it. ) Pour the filling into the crust and bake for an hour. See note #1! It will be still a little jiggly when it comes out of the oven, that's ok. Let it cool at room temperature for an hour, then stick it in the fridge over night and it will set up.

1. My oven is known to cook very unevenly. To compensate for this, I baked mine for 25 minutes, turned it around, and baked it for another 25 minutes. Remember, every time you open the oven, your cooking time increases by a few minutes so take that into account if you need to do the same.
2. Heating the cookie crumbs as well as the butter softens the crumbs. You need less butter to hold them together than you would if you were using crackers because cookies already have a high fat content.
3. Use full fat yogurt if you can get it. The original recipe calls for sour cream, so stop worrying about the fat content. It's a cheesecake for crissakes.

So why do I keep putting greek yogurt in things if I'm not worried about the fat content? Because sour cream is not a multi-tasking ingredient. I make my own yogurt because it's cheap that way, so that's always what there is in the fridge. In most recipes, you can use greek yogurt and sour cream interchangeably, but I can't eat a bowl of sour cream and cereal for my breakfast. Blerg. Yogurt is more tart than sour cream (which I like), and you have to be careful adding it to hot dishes because it can curdle, but mostly it's easier for me to use that than planning ahead and buying a whole other thing that doesn't go in anything else. I'm lazy, basically.

Let that be a lesson to you!

I should really pay more attention to what I'm doing.

I wanted to make a version of the cream cakes I'd done before, but not only did I change the recipe, I forgot a major ingredient. Fortunately, the result wasn't bad at all.

2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup oatmeal
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

melted butter and sugar for dunking

Pre-heat oven to 350.

Put cupcake papers in a 12-dish muffin pan.

Mix together all the dry ingredients, making sure the baking powder doesn't have any lumps left in it. Gently stir in the cream and mix just until it forms an even mass of dough. Divide into 12 parts. Roll each part in melted butter, then in sugar. Bake in the prepared muffin pan for 30 minutes. Remove from the pan immediately and cool on a wire rack. Serve with peaches, cream, and this butterscotch sauce which was the whole reason I made sweet biscuits anyway:

Fry half a dozen pieces of good-quality bacon in a heavy skillet. Use medium heat so that the bacon drippings don't burn. When the bacon is done, use it to make BLTs or something. Pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the bacon fat and add

2 tablespoons salted butter
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 teaspoon salt or more, depending on taste
about 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Stir everything together, and simmer for about 2 or 3 minutes to condense it slightly. Taste for salt and vanilla, it requires a surprising amount of both. While you shouldn't be too worried about adding too much vanilla (it's very difficult to over-vanilla something) it is possible to over-salt it. If you taste the sauce and it's just a little not quite quite, add a little pinch of salt, and taste again. Different kinds of salt do vary in intensity, so start low and build up.

The sauce is phenomenal. The original recipe is from Smitten Kitchen, but as soon as I saw it I thought it would be even better if I made it with bacon fat. The smoke flavor is very subtle, it just shows up in the aftertaste as a kind of outdoorsy effect. Like smelling your neighbor's barbecue while you eat dessert.

That aside, as a method for eating butterscotch sauce, the biscuits could use some work. To wit:

1. I forgot to add the sugar in the dough. The proper recipe calls for 1/3 cup.
2. Because I forgot the sugar, the dough was more dry than I wanted. Sugar adds a lot more moisture than you'd think.
3. Because the dough was dry, it didn't poof up as much as I wanted.
4. Although it's possible that my baking powder is too old.
5. Overall, they were tasty but I wanted them more moist and tender.

I can think of 3 ways to fix the problem.

1. I can put the dang sugar in like the recipe says. I don't like this solution because I like the less-sweet biscuit.
2. I can add more cream. This is probably the best option, although it might make the cooking time a bit longer.
3. I could add a smidge more baking powder and cook them for a shorter time at a higher temperature. Risky. After all, what I wanted most was a less dry biscuit, although having them poofier would be nice too.

Probably the best fix would be to add more cream and to buy fresh baking powder. I still have more butterscotch sauce to use up, but I might put it on pancakes and bananas instead.

The peaches were just perfect of course. It is the time of year for peaches, after all.

Purple Pie

 

 
It got too hot to bake frivolously, but I wanted pie. I saw a recipe for a refrigerator pie, and the idea of pie that requires no baking sounded good, but the ingredient list turned me off: oreo cookies, toasted sweetened coconut, coconut cream, whipped cream, cream cheese, fruit juice, and raspberries. I thought that sounded like a terrible thing to do to raspberries, so I streamlined the whole flavor/texture thing and came up with this.

for crust:

5 oz gingersnaps, I used Trader Joe's Tripple Ginger
4 T melted butter

filling:

8 oz cream cheese
3/4 cup blueberry jam
1/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup heavy cream
1 cup water + a couple tablespoons
1/4 oz envelope unflavored gelatin

1 additional cup heavy whipping cream
a pound of blueberries

Crush up the cookies and mix with melted butter.  Press firmly into the bottom of a pie pan and refrigerate until needed.

In a small dish, soften the gelatin in a couple tablespoons of cold water. Add 1 cup boiling water and stir to dissolve. Once the gelatin is completely dissolved and has cooled somewhat, put it together with the cream cheese, jam, condensed milk and 1/4 cup heavy cream in a blender and blend the heck out of it. Set aside.

Whip the cream until it holds soft peaks. Gently mix in the jam blend then pour half of it into your pie dish. Add a layer of berries, then the rest of the filling. Refrigerate over night, then garnish with whatever you have lying about.

1. Do bother to soften the gelatin in cold water first. If you just throw it in the boiling water, it tends to clump up in this really annoying way.
2. I bet you could use any flavor of jam/fruit/cookie combo for this. Strawberries with a Nilla Wafer crust. Peaches with a pecan sandy crust. Cherries with crust made of almond biscotti. Orange marmalade with chocolate graham crackers.
3. I used a spring form pan. If you want to do that too, first cover inside of the ring with a layer of foil, then insert the bottom to hold the foil in place. When the pie sets up, remove the ring then peel the foil away from the pie.
4. The white stuff in the picture is about 2 oz cream cheese, with enough cream mixed in to make it act like frosting, and enough lemon juice to make it a little tart and enough powdered sugar to make it a little sweet. Dump it on the pie, push it around to make a circle and heap up any leftover berries in the middle.
5. Next time I think I'll use something else for crust. The gingersnaps taste good, but I think they overwhelm the berries. David disagrees, though, so use your best judgement.

Basically, this is just whipped cream with a little jello in it to keep it from going flat. There is a thing called fool which is almost exactly  like this, except without the cheese and gelatin, so it's very sloppy and you just eat it out of a bowl and there's no crust. Fool is nice, but there isn't much textural interest. A cookie crust definitely adds some thing to the whole business. Also, the concept of an icebox pie seems quintessentially American to me, which makes it an appropriate thing to eat for Independence Day, which is when I made this thing.

Mexican Wedding Cookies

  

  
I keep thinking that the name for these things is probably apocryphal. I don't have any reason to think that, but I do. I think it about Italian Wedding Soup too, but I don't like Italian Wedding Soup, so I don't care. These cookies are excellent though, so I worry that I am calling my delightful little cookie nubs something that an actual Mexican person might roll their eyes at and think 'Stupid gringos, what do they know from Mexican weddings, anyway?' Never mind.

It is a super easy recipe. I followed it exactly. Unfortunately, I don't remember where I got it.

2/3 cup (65 grams) nuts
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1/4 (30 grams) cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups (260 grams) all purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt

more powdered sugar for rolling the cookies in

Toast the nuts lightly. Put them in a processor with a couple tablespoons of the flour and process them until they are finely ground, but haven't turned into paste.

Beat the butter and powdered sugar together. Beat in the vanilla and salt, add the nuts and remaining flour and beat until combined. Refrigerate until firm, about an hour.

Pre heat oven to 350. make 1" balls of dough and place them 2" apart on cookie sheets. Bake for 15 minutes. Let the cookies cool for about 5 minutes. While they are still warm, roll the cookies in powdered sugar. Place the sugared cookies on paper towel to cool. Ta da! Cookies.

Things to know:

1. Do use butter that is at room temperature. If it is too cold it will be hard to beat, and if its too warm, it will separate and the texture of the cookies will be hard.
2. Be gentle when rolling the cookies in sugar. They are very delicate and will crumble up if you bash them around.
3. I used walnuts. Some people don't like walnuts, because they have those slightly bitter papery husks, but these cookies are very bland by nature so I wanted the hint of astringency to balance it out. I bet hazelnuts would be good, or pecans and rosemary. Or pine nuts and orange zest. Hmmmm....
4. They will absorb a great deal of powdered sugar. Don't be shy, go ahead and smother them in it.
5. If you have a scale, do use it. The volume of powdered sugar in particular is highly variable, so the most accurate way of measuring it is by weight. 30 grams is 30 grams whether you cram it into a quarter of a cup or fluff it up to occupy a third.
6. The recipe says to use unsalted butter, so I did, because I actually had some. But next time I will probably like salted butter better, because once the cookies cool down, the savory contrast of the dough with the sugar coating flattens out a bit.

These are really lovely things. The dough is only mildly sweet, so the sugar coating isn't overpowering, and they are astonishingly delicate in texture for something that has such a high proportion of butter and nuts, and no leavening. I think this is partly due to the powdered sugar (which contains cornstarch) in the dough, but mostly to the behavior of butter itself. In the U.S., butter is legally required to have something like 83% milk fat in it. Which means that out of 1 cup of butter, a little less that 1/5 of it is actually water and milk protein and whatnot. That isn't enough to toughen the gluten in the flour, but it is enough to create a teensy bit of steam during cooking so that the starches fluff up a tad and the escaping water vapor creates a slight leavening effect. The result is a cookie that holds its shape just until you bite it and then dissolves with a slight crunch.

I think they're superb. I ate them instead of toast for breakfast today.

 

Dubious

  

  
In honor of national pie day, I made a coconut pudding pie. It isn't as strange as the basil seed thing, but it's not what I thought it would be either. I was thinking of a sort of egg custard pie, but with a coconutty aspect to it. But I distrust egg custard pies; I have it in my head that they are difficult and finicky things. There's no reason for me to think this. I've never tried to make one. But I decided to go for a pudding pie recipe instead, where you cook the crust and the filling separately. Irrespective of my fear of egg custard pies, the big reason I chose the pudding route was that I bought a disappointing coconut substance at Fubonn the last time I went.

You can get several brands of powdered coconut milk there. I have no idea what you're supposed to do with it for, but I put it in coffee as creamer, I use it as a topping for oatmeal, and I make rice pudding with it. Out of curiosity I tried a new brand, and it turned out to be slightly loathsome for any of my usual purposes. Unlike my preferred brand, this one has a large percentage of starch added. It also has a bunch of salt. The starch makes clumps in my coffee, and tastes chalky in my oatmeal. The salt is gross for both applications, so I didn't even try a rice pudding. So, pie.

One 9" pie crust of your preferred type. I made a slightly sweet pastry crust. 

Should have read the ingredients.

1 pack of this coconut powder
2 eggs
2 cups water
1 tsp vanilla
1/3 cup sweetened condensed milk
a pinch of nutmeg
toasted coconut flakes for the top

Pre-bake the crust until it is slightly browned and then let it cool completely.

Put everything else except the coconut flakes in a blender for about a minute, then pour the mix into a small saucepan over medium heat. Using a whisk, stir constantly until the filling is as thick as jello pudding. Pour the filling into the crust and refrigerate for at least a couple hours, until it is quite chilled. Top with toasty coconut just before serving.

This is super easy, but there are a few things that are worth explaining.

1. For the first 8 minutes the filling is on the stove, absolutely nothing will happen. Then it will thicken rapidly.
2. So why stir for all that time? To prevent lumps. The bottom of the pan will be hot enough to cook the filling solid down there before the rest of it is done unless you keep stirring.
3. A moderately slow and lackadaisical stirring motion is sufficient until it starts to gel up. Then you want to stir fast and methodically or again, lumps.
4. The toasty flakes add crunch, which is important because otherwise this would really be boring.
5. Remember the salt complaint? That's what the sweetened condensed milk is for. The salt is still in there, but the sugar balances it out. Also improves the mouth feel.
6. What if you don't have a blender? Make sure you whip it to within an inch of its life or else, Lumps!

My pie research led me to believe that the starch in the coconut powder would lend itself to a pudding-style filling, and I was right. If you like coconut pudding pie, there is no reason to go looking for this particular off-brand of coconut powder either, you can just use 2 cups of coconut milk and 1/4 cup of cornstarch instead. Make sure you get the full-fat kind of coconut milk too, no sense in doing things by halves.

Well of course I had pie for breakfast. And a boogerty egg and coffee. That's what you do on Pie Day.

Wait, what did you say?

  

  
When I said I wanted to make one of these, David thought I said I was going to bake a Stalin. So I laughed at him and said yeah, I'm gonna bake a tiny gingerbread dictator. "Five Year Plan", David says, in a silly Russian accent.

I thought it was funny.

Stollen is not bread, it's a yeast-risen cake. It tends to be quite dense, and it has candied fruit in it. I think it is related to panettone, which is another thing I may try to make someday. Right after the lefse.

For the dough:

2 1/2 tsp yeast
2/3 c warm milk
1 egg
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 cup butter
3 cups bread flour
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
pinch of allspice
2 cups mixed dried or candied fruit, cut into little bits

You may also want:

6 oz marzipan

1 oz brandy or rum
1 T butter
lots of powdered sugar

You can proof the yeast in the milk, if you want, but I use instant yeast so I don't bother. I put all the ingredients for the dough except the dried fruit in my bread machine for 20 minutes. After 15 minutes, I put in the dried fruit so it didn't get ground to paste by the beaters.

If you don't use a bread machine, you can do the mixing by hand, just be aware that the dough is extremely sticky. Unlike normal bread dough, this will not form a neat, easily handled ball. It will have a texture more like Jiff peanut butter, but springier.

Let the dough sit until it has doubled in size. Once the dough has risen, gently deflate it a bit then flatten it out on a well oiled cookie sheet. Squish the marzipan into a shape that fits well on slightly less than half the dough, then fold the dough over and pinch it closed around the marzipan. Let it rise until it has nearly doubled in size, then pre-heat the oven to 375. Bake the stollen at 375 for 15 minutes, then turn the heat down to 300. Bake for another 30-40 minutes.

Remove the stollen from the oven, and pierce the crust thoroughly with a fork or other sharp pokey thing. Put the brandy and butter in a small container and microwave just long enough to melt the butter. Stir or shake to emuslify the mix, then brush over the stollen. Generously coat the loaf with powdered sugar, then cover loosely until cool.

Notes:

1. I used a combination of candied orange peel, dried cranberries, raisins, and dates in mine. Some people use chopped nuts, too, and some recipes call for mace or cardamom. Feel free to flavor it the way you like it, it's your cake!
2. There is no reason you have to put marzipan in it, or cover it with brandy and sugar. But I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to. (Some people prefer to make a drizzle of icing out of confectioner's sugar, which does make it less messy.) If you do go for powdered sugar and hooch, be very generous with the sugar. Most of it will tamp down into the steam from the warm cake.
3. The loaf will not get very brown. Don't worry, it's not supposed to. Stollen should be moist, not crunchy.
4. It takes a very long time for this dough to rise. The high concentrations of fat and sugar in it inhibit the action of the yeast, so you do need to be patient. This recipe took me nearly 6 hours to make.
5. Ohmigod this is insanely delicious.

Do you remember the first time you ever encountered fruitcake? That rather horrid, soggy, mortar-like confection that never gets eaten but always turns up at christmas?  Wasn't that a great disappointment?  It always had those shiny red and green bits of candied fruit, and smelled alluringly boozy, and tasted like car exhaust and rubbing alcohol. I kept trying to eat it for years, hoping that one day, I would find a fruitcake that tasted as good as it looked.

My search has ended. This cake is tender and rich, delicately sweet, meltingly chewy. There is just enough fruit to make each bite a little different from the last. It has an alluringly boozy aroma all right, cuz dammnit, I put actual booze on my fruitcake. The coating of sugar compacts into a thin, ever so slightly crunchy crust that dissolves almost instantly in your mouth. Glucose euphoria.

Potato Candy

  

  
If your Mom is an old lady from the southeastern states, you have probably eaten this stuff around christmas. It is mouthwringingly sweet, and has a very peculiar texture which is at once chalky and creamy, kind of like fondant. It has peanut butter in it.Yes, it is made with a potato. There are lots of recipes online for it, but I still have no idea what the origin of the recipe could be. It's one of those things where you think about it and go 'Seriously? Who does that?'

1 baked russet potato
2 lbs powdered sugar, more or less
1 tsp vanilla
peanut butter

Peel and mash the potato. Add the vanilla and half the sugar. Mix until smooth, then gradually add more sugar until you have a stiff, rather sticky dough.

Roll the dough out between sheets of waxed paper until it is 1/8" thick, then spread a thin layer of peanut butter on it. Roll the dough up into a rope, then cut it into slices.

That's really it, but there is some stuff that is useful to know:

1. You can microwave the potato, but I think it would be better to actually bake it.
2. That's because you want to have the mashed potato be fairly dry, and also the baking will make a more pronounced potato flavor. It is Potato Candy, after all.
3. Even so, the first few cups of sugar will melt into a soup right away. That's normal. Just keep adding more.
4. Making a drier dough will make it less sticky, but it will be harder to roll out that way.
5. As you roll it out, peel the paper off the dough and rotate it frequently. It will come out smoother that way.
6. Roll slowly and gently. Violent treatment will cause the dough to resist handling.

One of the most interesting characteristics of this stuff is the handling property of the dough whereby it behaves like a solid and breaks into chunks if you cut or twist it, but it will ooze slowly through your fingers if you squeeze it gently. If you've ever played with cornstarch and water, or sand on a beach, the principle is the same. There is some cornstarch in powdered sugar, but that isn't what's making it behave that way.

When you first put the sugar in the mashed potato, the tiny sugar particles rapidly dissolve in the moisture from the potato. Eventually, the small amount of water present will no longer be able to dissolve any more sugar, and the sugar particles will remain intact, suspended in liquid, just like raw cornstarch (which is insoluble) in water. There is some kind of fancy physics explanation for why particles suspended in liquid behave that way, but I don't know what it is. I think it has to do with surface tension, but I could be totally wrong, so don't rely on me about that.

I only make this stuff about once every 4 or 5 years because I have to have forgotten that my sweet tooth is not powerful enough for me to want to eat more than 3 pieces of it. I did have one more incentive this time though: I bought a vintage potato press. It's totally neato. You fill the removable can with cooked potato, crank the handle down, and it instantly extrudes a whole recipe worth of perfectly mashed potato. I doubt it will see much use for potato candy in the future, but I do want to try making lefse. If I get up the nerve, I'll tell you about it.

Ta-Da!

Spiced Pear Cobbler

  

  
This is based on the curried pears that Cynthia's mom makes. The curried pears alone are a great side dish to go with ham or turkey at Thanksgiving, but I don't cook either of those things at my house. Pigs and turkeys are not grown in one-or-2- person sizes. I have cooked game hens like lilliputian turkeys, but that's a whole 'nother thing. Curried pears. Delicious no matter what.

Pears

2 or 3 pounds firm ripe pears, mixed varieties if possible
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 lemon
about 1 teaspoon curry powder of your choice
1" cinnamon stick
2 or 3 whole cloves
1/2 teaspoon turmeric if you want them more brightly colored
tiny pinch salt

Peel and core the pears. Put them in a saucepan with enough water to cover them, add all the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cover and cook until the pears are tender.

Now decide if you are going to make a cobbler today, or several days from now. If the latter, take the lemons, cinnamon, and cloves out of the pan and refrigerate the pears until you want them. Otherwise, use the following:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 stick butter
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup oatmeal
pinch of salt
2 teaspoons baking powder

Use a pastry cutter to bash these things together until the mix is well combined and there aren't any lumps of butter bigger than small peas.

Preheat the oven to 350. Put the pears and the cooking liquid in a casserole dish. Remove the cinnamon and cloves, and the lemons if you haven't already. Dump the dry ingredients on top and poke it down around the pears until it has an unevenly batter-like appearance with a few dry spots on top. Bake until brown and crusty on top.

Notes-

1. If your pears are cold because you have left your pears in the fridge for 4 or 5 days due to disorganized behavior, like I have, it will take over an hour to bake. If your pears are still warm, it will take rather less time.
2. Leaving the pears in the fridge for days will also make a more homogeneously flavored pear. If you want the pears to have more of a fresh-fruit taste, bake your cobbler immediately.
3. You can use canned pears. I did, the first time I made this, and it was just as tasty. The pears were a little softer maybe, but that was it. Just skip the sugar if you used canned.
4. You will need ice cream.
5. I'm not sure asian pears would be a good idea for this. But that could just be because I don't really like them much. I think they're boring.

For this and the apple pie recipe, I suggest using multiple varieties of apple or pear, because different kinds of fruits have different cooking characteristics. Some varieties will dissolve into mush very quickly, and others hold their shape well. Pears also have those crunchy bits in them, known as stone cells. Some kinds have fewer of these stone cells, or more or less acid in the fruit. Using several types of pears makes a more interesting flavor.

Another thing that's important is that you don't over mix the dry topping with  the pears. If you leave it somewhat uneven, the flour will absorb the liquid as it bakes, creating buttery, poundcakey regions around the chunks of pear and little pockets of sweet curry sauce. Man I wish I had some ice cream right now.
   

Kouign Aman

  

  
I've been holding onto this set of recipes I clipped out of the paper for over a year now, because they look so delicious, and never had the guts to try it. The instructions are super complicated, and the pictures are all fancy. The article has this sidebar that says stuff like, 'Don't skip the 3 different resting times!' and 'Make sure the dough is cool, but not too cold!' and 'Don't worry if the first 7nty billion times you try it don't turn out right!' Either I have very low standards, or it isn't nearly as complex as the recipe says.

Use 1/2 recipe of the ubiquitous pizza dough. It's fine, or even better, if it has been sitting in the fridge for rather longer than you like to think about.

Let the dough sit on the counter for about an hour, lightly flour the rolling surface, and roll the dough into a mostly rectangular shape about 11" x 14". Take a stick of butter out of the fridge, and cut about 3 tablespoons worth of very thin shavings off it, and sprinkle them on 2/3 of the dough. Sprinkle a couple pinches of sugar over it.

Fold the un-buttered part of the dough over half the buttered part, then fold it again so all the butter is inside. Roll the dough out until it's about 8 x 12 inches, very lightly sprinkle it with flour and sugar, and fold it in 3 parts again.

Roll it out until it's about 5 x 10 inches, and fold it in 3 parts again. Pinch the sides of the folds together tightly, pat it into a ball, and put it on a pie plate. It'll be about the size of a baseball, but flatter. Sprinkle the outside generously with sugar, and put a bowl over it while you pre-heat the oven to 450. Once the oven is hot, cut 3 slashes in an asterisk shape about 1/3 the way through the dough, and sprinkle with sugar again to cover all the exposed insides of the cuts. Sprinkle a tiny pinch of salt on it. Bake for about 35 minutes.

 Notes:

1. I suspect that leaving the dough until it is way over fermented helps it retain its layered structure. It also tastes more interesting.
2. If you aren't sure, be more generous with the butter. The butter is the main thing that keeps the dough from merging back into one big lump.
3. Use salted butter. And go heavy on the sugar on the outside.
4. If you have time, sure, you can let the dough rest between foldings. It will undoubtedly help create layering, but it's ok if you don't.
5. It will be sitting in a pool of melted butter by the time it's done. That's normal.
6. Eat it hot! It is not nearly as good cold, although it is ok if you toast it again later.

That's kinda it. The first time I tried it, my dough was about 10 days old, and it rose a lot less in the oven. On the other hand, the layers were more distinct. The second time, it was more bready, but still quite tasty. I think I squashed the dough a little too hard, and it merged the layers back together. But so what? I gather that these things were invented as a way to use up scraps of dough, so I think that having the process be somewhat approximate stays true to the original intent of just preventing waste. The name is some weird french dialect; it means Queen Anne. The shape of the bread is supposed to resemble a little crown.

Apple Pie

 

mmmmm...pie

 I went to the apple festival at Portland Nursery the other weekend and bought 23 pounds of apples. I made a pie for my birthday. I have never been a big fan of apple pie. I prefer almost any kind of pie better than apple, to tell the truth. But, apples are what I have, and since I don't own a mixer that would enable me to make my favorite apple walnut cake, a pie it was.

My pie turned out so well that I started wondering why I thought I don't like apple pie. I do like apple pie, if it is good pie: the problem is that the world is full of middling-to-bleh apple pies. Store bought pie is almost invariably tough in the crust, which is a major strike against it. They are also horribly sweet, which is strike two. The coup de gras is usually the fact that the 'apples' in said pies are not generally recognizable as such. They are an evil combination of mushy and fibrous. There is neither taste nor aroma to indicate appleness. There is goo, and not in a good way.

This is a better pie.

Use this crust recipe. You can use part whole wheat if you like the texture, or all white if you prefer. I did all white to keep it simple.

Filling

2 lbs mixed apples. I got several kinds, I don't remember what, but they were mostly firm and tart.
about 1/2 cup sugar
a pinch each of freshly grated nutmeg and cinnamon
2 cloves, ground
a dab of butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Begin to peel, core and chop the apples. As you are chopping them up, drop them into a medium-hot saucepan with the the butter. Keep adding apples as you peel, and stir in the sugar about halfway through the apples. Add the spices. Stir just enough to prevent the apples from browning very much. When you get to the end of the apples, some of them will be coming apart and some of them will be barely cooked. This is a good thing. Stir in the vanilla. Cover the pan and remove from heat while you roll out the bottom crust and arrange it in a 9" pan. Pour in the filling, top it with the other half of the pastry, and bake at 350 for about an hour or until the crust is as brown as you like it, that is, until you loose your patience and have to eat your pie right NOW.

Notes:

1. Apples are about the perfect pie fruit, apparently.
2. This is because they have a large amount of pectin in them.
3. Which is important, because pectin has the curious property of gelling up when cooked with both sugar and acid.
4. That means that it's important to put at least a little sugar in the filling as you cook it, especially if the apples are tart. Not enough sugar means the pectin won't thicken properly.
5. It also means that you should cook the apples first, because if you just put the raw apples in the crust, the pastry will burn before the apples are cooked on the inside, and the apples have to cook in order to activate the pectin.

What is pectin anyway? The Wikipedia page has way more technical stuff than I want to know, but the gist of it seems to be that pectin is a kind of dietary fiber found in fruits. People use it for a lot of things, most notably in making jam, because soft fruits like berries contain little pectin and will therefore make a very thin, soupy jam without adding some in.

My pie didn't last very long. It was tart and crispy edged when it was hot out of the oven, and it was sweeter and melty crusted for breakfast and lunch the next day. There was no goo. The apples cooked into a pleasant combination of firm fruity bits and sauce, with just enough spice to snazz it up.

  

Oh Banana Bread!

  

  
Why are you so delicious? Why is it so hard not to eat you with a spoon right out of the oven?

Why banana 'bread'? It isn't even legitimately bread, it's CAKE, damnit. And why is it so hard to get a loaf of banana bread out of a non-stick pan? I am champing with impatience to eat this thing right now, and it's too hot, and it won't come unstuck, and all I can do is put a picture on the internet so that at least everyone else can share my suffering.

3/4 c sugar
5 T softened butter
2 eggs
1 1/2 c very ripe bananas (that was 3 medium sized ones for me)
1/2 c greek yogurt
1tsp vanilla
2 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 c chopped toasted walnuts

 Pre-heat the oven to 350.

Put all the moist ingredients in a large mixing bowl and whip the bajeebus out of them. Add the sugar and salt, whip again. Sift in the flour and soda, mix until smooth, mix in the nuts, then pour into a loaf pan. Bake for 1 hr 20 min. Seriously, it's that easy.

But there are some things that are useful to know:

1. Start with the eggs and bananas at room temperature. Makes the bread poofier. If your eggs and or bananas are cold, stick them in a bowl of hot tap water for about 10 minutes.

2. No, you don't have to put in the nuts. But if you do, it is important to toast them first, they have much more flavor that way,.

3. Learn from my mistake and line the pan with waxed paper. Oil the pan, put in the paper, oil and flour the paper, then pour in the batter.The paper keeps the bread from touching the pan. No touching = no sticking.  Oiling the pan keeps the paper from scooting around. Oiling & flouring the paper makes it possible to get the paper off the bread when you want to eat it.

4. There is a handful of crumb topping on it. Take roughly equal parts of flour, sugar(either brown or white), oatmeal and butter. Ok, be a little generous with the butter. Add a teaspoon of baking powder for every 3 cups of crisp. Smash everything into pea-sized morsels, then freeze it until you want to use it.

The original recipe I found on the Betty Crocker website called for nearly twice as much butter and sugar, and uses buttermilk instead of yogurt. I never have buttermilk, but yogurt is pretty much the same. As I've written it above, this bread is not as heavy and gummy as many recipes I've tried, and the banana favor isn't overwhelmed by sugar. Yes, I gave up waiting for the thing to come un-glued from its pan. At least I used a knife to cut out a piece, not a spoon.Well, two pieces. For now.

Cannibal!

  

  
This thing is also called a German pancake, but it is more fun to say "Honey, do you want to eat a Dutch Baby for breakfast tomorrow?"

The recipe for the pancake is exactly the same as the one found here, (except that I always use salted butter) but there are a couple things I think are useful to know, namely that

1. It does make a big difference to use eggs & milk at room temperature. They poof much less when cold.

2. Make sure the oven is fully pre-heated, then make up the batter. It is too easy to get impatient and ravenous and put the batter in the oven before it's hot enough.

3. Freshly grated nutmeg & cinnamon.

4. Heat the skillet on the stove top, not in the oven. Otherwise you will get it smoking hot and the butter will scorch and it will not taste good.

5. NO PEEKING! If you open the oven even once, the thing will go all flat and never recover, but it will taste good anyway.

This recipe, cooked in a 10" frying pan is exactly the right amount of breakfast for 2 modestly sized, moderately hungry adults. I skipped the orange sugar recommended in the original recipe, and went with jam and greek yogurt on one piece and maple syrup and super-dark chocolate on the other. Break the chocolate into bites and poke them into the hot pancake to get melty before slopping on the syrup.

In the middle of the winter, I'm going to break down and cook one of these in bacon drippings.

Spiced Cream Cakes with Strawberries

  

  
Strawberry shortcake is the most photogenic food. It's all pink and white and fluffy, and there are these berries, and these poofs of cream, and there is this crunchy sugar top. It just looks yummy. It helps that it really is every bit as good to eat as it is to look at. I love strawberry shortcake, it was the ultimate dessert when I was a kid. This recipe was not brought on by a sense of boredom with the original, I just became enamored of the smell of indian spice mixes.Technically these are not shortcakes, 'shortcake' being an abbreviation of 'shortening cake', meaning a cake made with shortening. There isn't any shortening per se in these things, the recipe calls for a great deal of heavy cream instead, but everybody knows what you mean when you say Strawberry Shortcake: a rich, lightly sweetened, somewhat dense but tender cookie/biscuit thing with gobs of strawberries with some type of cream thing, usually either iced or whipped, if not both.

Masala Spices

Mix 1/2 teaspoon each of:
cumin
coriander
nutmeg
black pepper
cinnamon

and 1/4 teaspoon each of:
cardamom
cloves
star anise or anise seed


Cream Cakes

2 teaspoons masala spice mix
2 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
zest of 1 lemon
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Pre-heat oven to 350.

Melt about 2 tablespoons of butter in a small bowl, and put about a half cup of sugar in another. Set those aside.

In a small dry saucepan, toast the spices for a minute or two at medium-low heat. They will smoke a bit, but you don't want them to do more than change color very slightly. Dump them into a large mixing bowl and shake them around to stop the cooking, or they will get burnt.

Sift all the dry ingredients together into the mixing bowl. Gently stir in the cream, then knead lightly just until the dough comes together in a ball.  Divide the dough into 12 balls. Dip the top of each ball into the butter, then the sugar. Put the balls on a cookie sheet sugar side up. Bake for 25-30 minutes.

Cool the cakes, then serve with your favorite decorations.

  Notes:

1.The original recipe (from Rustic Fruit Desserts) said to divide the dough into 8 pieces. I think making them smaller would be better. You can always eat 2 small cakes if you want them, but it is somehow much less satisfying to eat part of a larger cake, even if that is all you want.

2. Next time, I might make these in cupcake tins, with cupcake papers and stuff. Besides looking cute, it would keep the cakes more ball shaped. This would allow me to cook the outsides a little crunchier without drying out the insides too much.

3. I might also use a coarser sugar. More texture than regular old table sugar.

4. You have to use salted butter on the outsides! Otherwise they will just be bland.

5. The measurements given for the spice mix assume that the spices are already ground when you measure them. Spices bought ground up are fine, but I like to do my own. Nutmeg in particular is much  more flavorful if it's freshly ground.

These remind me of gingerbread, but are just slightly more exotic. Garam Masala is used in meat dishes usually, but it is largely composed of things western cooking uses for sweets, with the addition of black pepper and coriander which gives gives the flavor a hotter, earthier punch. I would eat these cakes with any berries, or poached pears or apples, or grilled peaches with walnuts and mascapone, or fresh figs, or greek yogurt, or nothing at all. It's all about the crunchy top. That part is really good.

Now THAT'S a strange thing...

  

  
I got this terribly poorly edited Indian cookbook, which had a picture of this gorgeous looking dessert in it. Probably the picture had something to do with my buying the damn book, I've had mixed experiences with it so far. I finally made this recipe, and it is even more bizarre than I had hoped.

There's a fairly normal layer of whipped cream on top, but the red stuff underneath is mighty strange. It's made with basil seeds. They aren't naturaly that color, that's just food coloring, which looks better than their natural cloudy brownish gray.

Put 1 cup of water and 2 tablespoons of sugar in a small sauce pan and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and add 1 teaspoon of basil seeds, a drop of food coloring, and 1/2 teaspoon of orange extract. Remove from heat and admire the swelling of the seeds. Chill, and top with a bit of whipped cream.

Basil seed are really neat, because they have a large amount of water soluble fiber in their husks. That's the stuff that food nutrition labels call 'dietary fiber', I think. In any case, when you put them in water, they instantly start to expand by an order of magnitude. You can actually see them swelling up. The seeds start out black and shiny, and as soon as they hit the water they develop a pearly gray coating that expands and becomes more gelatinous and transparent over the next half hour or so. If you've ever seen chia seeds in the natural foods section of the grocery store, those will do exactly the same thing. You can buy Kombucha with chia floating around in it, it looks polkadotted. Or like a bottle of tiny frog eggs.

But what on earth do they taste like?!?

Not much, to tell the truth. If you chew the seeds, they have a very faintly grassy flavor. It's more about texture. If you like those tapioca things in bubble tea you might enjoy this, but you might not. If you bite tapioca, it's all jelly. These seeds have a little crunchy middle. It's quite distinctive. You notice this is a very small recipe- I don't think anybody will want to eat more than a few spoonfuls of it. It would make some really badass Halloween shots with a kick of tequila, but that's about the only reason I can think of to do it again.

Skunk Works

  

  
I said I'd bring an experimental cake to family dinner. Pete said "skunk works dessert is fine by me." It had a familiar sound to it, but I still had to look it up, and then I was all tickled by the idea of Skunk Works Cake. No advanced physics knowledge is required, but the original recipe did ask for a pound of quark.

Skunk Works Lemon Yogurt Cake

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp lemon zest, minced
2 T sugar
7 T butter
pinch of salt
1 egg, beaten

Cut the butter into the dry ingredients until it looks like aquarium gravel. Beat the egg well, and gently toss it in with the dry mix, then fold it all together until it forms a cohesive mass. Flatten it into a pancake about an inch thick, wrap it in wax paper and refrigerate it until you do the other parts.

3 egg yolks
3/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
7 T butter (yes! again!), softened
6 oz heavy cream
17 oz (500g) greek style yogurt
1 tsp lemon zest, 
1 1/2 T cornstarch
pinch of salt
3 egg whites

You need a springform pan for this.

Pre-heat the oven to 325

Whisk the yolks, vanilla, and sugar together until they become light colored and creamy looking. Whisk in the butter, then the cream. Mix in the yogurt, salt, cornstarch and lemon zest.

Roll out the crust, and lay it in the pan. Try to make sure the pastry goes all the way down into the corner where the sides meet the bottom.

Whisk the egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then fold them into the batter. Fill the shell and bake for around an hour and a half.

Serve cool. Eat with strawberries, and your favorite people.

Notes:

1. I don't have an electric mixer. I do have an excellent wire whisk, which does a good job on all that fluffing that is necessary for good cake. I also now have a sore triceps. And a sore thing-that-attaches-your-scapula-to-your-ribs-in-the-back.
2. When rolling out that crust, don't worry if it splits into crazy shapes. Just get it evenly flat, then piece it back together in the pan.
3. My oven. Oh my stupid oven. I have no idea if the cooking time I've stated will be correct for you. Start by baking it for an hour, and if the batter still looks quite pale and has not poofed up at all in the middle of the pan, check back in 15 minute intervals. It's done when it has fully inflated and is looking just slightly darkened.
4. When you put it in the crust, the batter will only fill about about 2/3 of the pan. This is fine, the egg whites make it like a souffle; it will expand a lot.
5. Which means that you should make sure that the crust comes up all the way to the top of the pan.

So, it's basically just a cheesecake, right? Yup. I guess in Germany they make a very thick, over-condensed version of yogurt and call it quark. After reading about quark, I figured that I could use that batch of yogurt that I let get too strong in this recipe. 'Quarkkuchen' sounds like a pretty cool thing to eat, huh? But other than as a means of using up unsatisfactory yogurt, is it worth doing again? Yes indeedy.

I love the texture of baked cheesecake, but they are awfully rich. I like the relative lightness of no-bake cheesecake, but the texture is a bit gloppy and the high concentration of lemon juice usually used to set them makes the flavor pretty unsubtle. I wanted something in between, and I think this fits the bill. It seems to be related to the fallen souffle cake I made a long time ago, in that the inflation during cooking is not a feature to be desired in itself so much as it is a way to know if the thing is done or not- this cake deflates rapidly when it's out of the oven. The texture is very light, almost delicate, even when it has gotten completely cold. The lemony flavor is brought out by the tartness of the yogurt, but unlike in a no-bake cake, the lemon doesn't overpower everything else.

This recipe is the perfect size for dessert at family dinner, with a small slice leftover for me to eat for breakfast.

Granola Bars

  

  
I am a secret hippy. The smell of food co-ops makes me all nostalgic, because I hung around so many hippies when I was a kid. There is something about the type of utterly sincere yet completely dodgy presentation food co-ops have that feels very homey to me. I started thinking about it after I made these when I had a huge jones for granola bars last week. The toasty oatmeal and burnt raisin aroma kinda brought it back for me. Probably the sugar rush might have had something to do with the sudden feeling of well being too. These are not some dreary, self righteous wrestling match for your jaw and GI tract, they are cookies, by goll, and they are delicious. They are also good for breakfast, smushed into warm milk, with sliced bananas.

2 1/2 cups old fashioned oatmeal
1/2 cup raw sunflower seed kernels
1/2 cup toasted nuts
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup chopped date bits
1/4 cup toasted flax seeds
1 T butter
1 t oil
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt

Put the oatmeal and the sunflower seeds on  a sheet pan and toast them at 350 for about half an hour. Stir them every few minutes, or they will burn. When you take them out, turn the oven down to 300.

Put the butter, oil, honey, sugar, vanilla and salt in a small sauce pan over medium heat and stir until the sugar has all dissolved. Mix all the ingredients together and press into an even layer in an oiled 9 x13" pan. Bake for half an hour. Let them get mostly cool before you cut them into bars.

notes-

1. The kind of nuts and seeds you use is really not important. Basically you have 2 and a half cups oatmeal to one cup fruit and one cup nuts and seeds. Mine have hazelnuts, because that's what I got. I did this with sesame seeds once before this post, and they were a tad bitter; flax seed is more popcorny.
2. It's important to get the ingredients toasted. They taste better.
3. These get sticky mighty fast. Keep them in an airtight container or wrap them individually.
4. They are really sticky before they are cooked too. Use one of those silicone spatulas to press the mix into the pan or it will get all over your hands. Press them down again as soon as they come out of the oven too, since they will poof up a bit as they bake.