-
Water icing
Water icing is simple and cheap to make. It’s also super flexible, suitable for many sweet treats! 1 cup powdered sugar 2 – 3 tbsp hot water a few drops vanilla (optional) lemon juice (optional) other flavourings as appropriate for your recipe Sift the sugar into a bowl. Decide what optional flavourings you are going…
-
Shortening substitute
I am trying to replace all the “weird” ingredients in my cooking with more natural ingredients. Shortening has been a particularly difficult one to substitute, as it has certain properties that no other cooking fat has. One suggestion I read was to try substituting clarified butter. In a spirit of scientific enquiry, I tried it…
-
Kitchen scales
I know that most American cooks use volume measurements in their cooking, but a set of dual-unit (lbs and kg) kitchen scales allow more precision and more repeatability in your cooking. Just now, on Amazon.com, there are sets of digital scales from $7 to well over $200. Most of these scales are well rated by…
-
Cake Flour substitute
Cake flour makes the best cakes; light, delicate, delicious. It is also expensive and can be difficult to find. So let’s substitute it! 3.5 cups All Purpose (plain) flour 0.5 cups corn starch Put the ingredients in a container with a firmly fitting lid, and shake well to combine. (Pretend you’re playing the maracas…) Use…
-
Scones
In a shocking bout of amnesia, I forgot to post the basic scone recipe, courtesy of Steve’s Kitchen. His recipe is a bit sparse, so here it is fleshed out in all its glory. 350g / 12oz of Self Raising Flour 85g / 3oz of Castor / Superfine Sugar 85g / 3oz of Softened Butter…
-
Sticky Toffee Pudding
It is just a simple fact that Sticky Toffee Pudding is everyone’s favourite, they just may be in denial about it. My son adores this stuff and will happily try to eat his own body weight of sticky deliciousness. If you don’t like Sticky Toffee Pudding, that’s fine: Jamie will eat your share! 1 cup…
-
BBQ sauce
I have been trying to find a BBQ sauce worth making for a long time. I have tried so many different recipes, all of which have let me down. Until now. This recipe hits every note I expect a BBQ sauce to have. Enjoy! 1/2 onion, minced 4 garlic cloves, minced 3/4 cup whisk(e)y* 2…
-
Pancake syrup
Based on my experiments with treacle and dark treacle, I decided to take on pancake syrup. With genuine maple syrup being quite expensive, and commercial pancake syrups being mainly high fructose corn syrup, I wanted something with ingredients I have in my pantry. One problem with the cheater pancake syrups on sites like Allrecipes is…
-
Update to Dark Treacle
Over on this post I take you through how to make Dark Treacle. I recently managed to source some Lyons Dark Treacle at a reasonable price, so I was able to do a side-by-side taste comparison. If you’d like to make a Dark Treacle that tastes almost exactly like Lyons, there is one simple substitution.…
-
Does your recipe help or hinder?
I have been having a lot of fun deep diving into the history of pudding and making the recipes, but there is a group of recipes that are quite annoying. Pudding is supposed to meet 3 criteria: easy quick cheap I have lost track of how many contemporary recipes have ingredients such as “organic free…