March 27, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Adventures in cooking
So I'm making my own Easter dinner for one this evening, and so far it's been an adventure. Lessons learned:
* Do not make an egg wash for your hot cross buns if you don't have a pastry brush in your rented flat
* Do not plaster the egg wash onto the hot cross buns with your fingers if your small English oven is going to carmelise it in two minutes flat. Unless you like your buns . . . er . . . ultra-brown
* Digestive biscuits make an even better crust for your lemon tart than do graham crackers, which are not available in English supermarkets.
* Tesco organic lamb chops are the tiniest pieces of meat in existance.
* You can find anything on Google, including this fantastic page on how to cook with gelatin if your recipe calls for granulated gelatin, and all you could find in the supermarket was the leaf kind.
* You can make surprisingly good lemon curd with leaf gelatin. However, leaf gelatin looks really weird when it's dissolving. Like, space alien weird. Tastes fine, though.
* It doesn't take as long a time as you'd think to whip cream with a whisk.
* If you do not put your garlic away immediately, you will lose it somewhere in the unfamiliar kitchen of your rented flat.
* It takes approximately six years to get enough zest for hot cross buns and a lemon tart without your Microplane zester. I have come to a whole new level of appreciation for whatever godlike creature gave the world this wondrous tool.
Happy Easter, everyone!
Update
I just ate the lemon tart whose recipe I linked above. (I mean, a piece of it. I'm not that much of a pig.) The tart itself is very good (I put some extra zest and juice in; I loooove lemon), but the whipped cream is totally unnecessary; in fact, after a few bites, it was kind of disgusting.
It might be that English double cream has more butterfat than American heavy cream; it sure did whip up fast. On the other hand, I bought one of those whisks with the ball in them, which might explain the truly astonishing whipping speed.
At any rate, I now know the rationale behind meringues; there's not much there. They look pretty, but they don't take anything away from the main event underneath, unlike whipped cream, which tries to horn in and hog the spotlight. So it's back to lemon meringue for me, or plain lemon tart. I just can't understand how such a vile combination got such great reviews on Epicurious.
Posted by Jane Galt at March 27, 2005 2:12 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksYeah microplane graters are fantastic for zesting. Much faster than a zester or a box grater and you seem to get much more from each fruit, without any of the pith. They're great for nutmeg too. And hard cheeses. And fingers!
Sounds like you had a great Easter! The lemon tart sounds delicious.
If you're out and about and find yourself tempted to try English icecream do yourself a favor and don't, the stuff is just plain vile.
If you find yourself without a pastry brush in the future, a rolled-up paper towel can usually get the job done. I guess it depends on how thick the egg wash is.
Ummm, lemon meringue pie, breakfast of champions.
There's room here for a comment about the marginal propensity to consume....
Megan, I think you ended up with too heavy a cream. This UK recipe site says double cream is at least 48% butterfat (!!). This PDF from the US Dairy Council lists light whipping cream as 30-36% milkfat, and anything over 36% is heavy cream. (I'm assuming that milkfat and butterfat are the same thing; the Dairy Council guys, of course, want to emphasize how healthy milk is.)
In the UK, you want to look for "whipping cream", which is 35% (or more) butterfat. Alternately, I suppose you could mix two parts double cream with one part milk to get something like a light whipping cream.
You probably know that it's easier to whip cream when it's cold; putting the bowl and whisk in the fridge for at least 30 minutes helps quite a bit. It also helps to add the sugar late in the whipping process (tho I spose 1 tablespoon won't have much effect).
I guess it depends on how thick the egg wash is.
And that, in turn, depends on how dirty the egg is.
Toppings on lemon tarts and pies are _at best_ gilding the lily. More typically...well, sounds like you already made that aesthetic discovery.
Ditto on the whipping cream. I tend to use single cream for whipiing.
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