My wife made a crepe cake once. I don’t think my blood sugar has ever recovered properly.
Alton Brown is amazing. We’ve not watched it much, but have you ever seen Iron Chef? The quote I remember most is one of the chef’s saying, ’ I just grated a thousand dollars of truffle over the pasta’
Sunday the 31st will be my sister’s birthday, and by then we might be able to have up to eight visitors. So as a special treat I am going to roast a piece of beef. This one:
I toasted two tablespoons of black pepper, two of coriander seeds, and two of rock salt, and one teaspoon of whole allspice in a small pan until the first kernel popped:
Then ground the seasoning coarsely:
I packed the moist surfaces of the joint of beef with the ground seasoning:
Put it into a brown paper bag:
Fastened the bag loosely and put it on a cooling rack so that airflow can keep the bottom of the bag dry:
And put it into my spare fridge, which is seldom opened. The beef will dry brine and then dry age, with the salt, dry condition, and low temperature preventing mould or any biofilm from growing on the surface while it ages (collagen hydrolysing to gelatin).
In three weeks I will slow-roast that beef over charcoal, and send you photos of the process and results.
Shouldn’t that be 35 layers? 17 crepes with filling on top of them (for 34 of the layers) and then one more crepe on top? 
Yesterday was my daughter’s birthday. Because of the current silliness, we couldn’t have a real party, so the cake I made was a simple three layer cake, filled with raspberry whipped cream, and frosted in chocolate buttercream.
If I’d make one of these things more than once a year, I’d probably remember how properly frost a cake before I finished doing it.
Whenever I write out a recipe for anyone I always start with “Step Zero: read this recipe carefully, all the way through to the end.” Because you have no idea how often people throw out the marinade or don’t keep the drippings.
Once upon a time my sister was whipping up some plum puddings for after lunch and came to the instruction “cover, and leave to age for three months”.
I’ve been thinking of making crepes on mother’s day. With strawberry compote.
This was my last foray into good experimentin, shrimp toast!
I had seen way over priced apps at the store and remembered having one that was tasty years ago so I gave it a ho
I minced half the shrimp and rough chopped the rest (I like to know I’m eating shrimp). Cream cheese, green onion, garlic past, mayo.
I cut the bread and lightly toasted it and then lightly buttered it. Then smeared with filling and baked
Turned out crispy and very tasty.
Hubby says he wants them any time we have apps and father’s day.
@dscheidt I hope your daughter is old enough that you didn’t have to deal with chocolatey hand prints everywhere later, because that cake looks deliciously gooey 
Possibly the only thing recipes share with exams!
I’ve never been surprised by an “age for three months”, but have definitely got halfway through cooking something before discovering that it has to be left overnight…
“But recipes are like programs!” “Did the program tell you not to keep the marinade?”
Happens to me all the time. I tend to read things I expect to read and then… I have to improvise.
@Agemegos if you keep posting pictures like that my partner will end up making an account here. He’s already drooling and wondering if you have a specific dry-aging fridge…
The “dry ageing fridge” also accommodates some beer, white wine, and confit duck legs. And its freezer is full of frozen stock.
Not sure what order those are going to be in, but here we go.
My workmate was given “too much 00 flour” (like that’s a thing), so I nabbed some and made pizza. Denser than expected but also very fluffy, in a you had to eat it kind of way. I think the best part was the roast pumpkin sauce (with garlic and mushroom) I made to replace the tomato sauce. Really good winter flavors to deal with the first bleak days of autumn.
I’ve also found cheap pork cheek, so I’m gonna have a go making guanciale. Originally I was gonna make sweet sweet carbonara with it but since then we discovered my son egg allergy. Maybe I’ll just fry it instead? I’m sure it’ll be great either way.
As a matter of interest, where does that fit in Flour - Wikipedia ?
(Readng that I find it very dispiriting how vague the UK grades are.)
I don’t have the packaging so all I can tell you is it’s Australian and fairly fine grained? Slightly coarser than icing sugar?
Really good quality flour is remarkable difficult to find here (or I’m bad at looking and a pennypincher), so I’m just happy to get it for free. And where other countries had a run on toilet paper, our supermarkets sold out of flour for weeks. Weeks I tell you. I don’t know how we managed.
Mmh. That roast-pumpkin pizza sauce looks and sound like an “I have to try that!”
As someone married to a person who both loves pizza and hates tomato, I may have to steal this idea…
All flour grading is horribly vague. There are too many dimensions for a simple grade to capture. How finely ground, how much of the kernel, what kind of wheat, what treatments… I get the spec sheets for the flours I use, and they’re about five pages long, and include all sorts of details on performance. American commercial flour is amazingly consistent, bag to bag, year to year.
@Fodder256 The US had a run on retail flour, too. Or so I’m told. I keep about 100 pounds in the basement, so I didn’t notice. That’s about six month supply for us, I get it in 25 or 50 pound bags, depending on the brand. it’s about a third the price of (lower quality) retail flour. The millers say there’s no real shortage, it’s just a packaging problem: retail flour is in 5 or 10 pound bags. Commercial flour is in 50 or (rarely 25) pound bags, and lots of it is used in railcar quantities, no bag at all.
@Whistle_Pig She’s six. Last year, we had about 50 kids running around and screaming. There were doubtless some cake frosting on the wall, but I don’t remember. That was a much more elaborate cake, with integral tiger stripes.
Toilet paper, flour, and baby food were the things we struggled to order when getting groceries delivered basically the entire month of April (and the last weeks of March).
Eventually we got enough of everything we needed and it’s much easier finding things in stock when placing a delivery order now than last month.
Unfortunately, at least here where I am in the US, any flour other than “All-purpose” is hard to find and usually fairly pricey. We got a 25lb bag of it from Costco.
Although, after the look I got from my mechanic after I used it to change my oil… And the incident with the opthalmologist… I’m starting to think it’s actually just “Baking-Purposes” flour we got; must have been a mixup at the factory with the packaging.
Did I ever tell you I have 2 physics degrees? It’s true! Astrophysics and medical physics. AND I worked in high-tech R&D for over a decade!
And basic math ruins me.
Okay, let’s do this. 18 crepes, 17 layers of filling… or is that 16 layers? No, you’re right, it’s better to think of each crepe as having one layer of filling (on top of it) except for the last layer. So 35 layers (17 crepe, 17 filling, top crepe).
You should watch me try to add scores to board games sometime. It’s a joy.
Ah-MAY-zing.
I’m normally really good about reading both ingredients and instructions! Partially out of precision (I tend to be a very precise baker… which isn’t necessarily a good thing because…) and partially out of a complete lack of “sense”. You know that thing that tells you “Hey, wait, adding 3 TABLESPOONS of cumin doesn’t make sense here, it must be teaspoons and that was a typo”… yeah, I have none of that.
But we all make mistakes, and this was mine. End result was still pretty tasty (although lacking something… like, depth? It was sweet and vanilla-y, but there wasn’t much more than that. But, again, I’m not a huge crepe fan, but my partner is).
Canada aussi… flour, baking powder, and yeast. Poof.
Thankfully a buddy went to Costco (a sentence I never thought I would write) and nabbed us 20kg of flour (50lbs-ish), which I have slowly been working through. 3 loaves of bread a week (1kg flour), 6 pizza doughs a month (another kg), and then pancakes every Monday (2 cups of flour). And now the crepe cake experiments (this week’s experiment will be something chocolate-themed… I’m thinking S’mores crepe cake, with marshmallows on top since Andy also loves marshmallows), which mostly just obliterate eggs and milk (6 eggs for the crepe batter, 6 for the pastry cream).
I was encouraged to bake a cake for my mother for Mother’s Day. So the chocolate sheet cake I go to came together.
Dry ingredients and buttermilk/egg mixture ready, that’s what 3.25 cups powdered sugar on the right for icing:
Visually distinct moment when buttermilk mixture added to batter:
And cake done and iced:
The thing I’ve heard in the UK about flour is that it’s not the flour itself that’s in short supply (pre-made bread has continued to be available at something like normal levels) but the small paper sacks that it’s sold in in retail quantities. I was able to find a 16kg bag in a webshop so primitive it didn’t even ask for an email address, just a phone number…
I don’t think that can be the whole story, because sugar is sold in identical-looking sacks and (at least round here) has been readily available in the same places that don’t have flour.
