I Can't Make Marshmellows

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

After that intro, you may be wondering why I don't have a mouth-watering picture of chocolate-dipped marshmallow cookies. Or perhaps you were expecting crispy delicate Milanos. The answer is quite simple ... there aren't any.

How exactly did this experiment go down? I decided to go for the harder, more interesting, cookie: the mallows.

I knew things were going awry when I couldn't roll the dough to 1/8 inch. It was warm here, and the dough started to melt. I did improvise my way out of the mess by rolling the sticky dough into logs, freezing and then cutting off thin slices. I have to admit that I was a little puzzled as to how a recipe for approximately two dozen cookies yielded over 100, but I decided to push onward.

The marshmallows. Geez, from reviewing the posted pictures, I must be the only Daring Baker that can't make marshmallows, but there is absolutely no doubt that mine were a failure. When I attempted to mix the hot sugar syrup with softly whipped egg whites, the whole thing immediately deflated, leaving me with a sticky, sugary, egg white mess. This went the only place it could, down the drain.

I debated dipping my tiny, naked cookies in chocolate, but at this point I was batting so low, I thought I probably shouldn't waste the chocolate.

Not every daring challenge can be a success. Maybe next time!

Crunchy Brown Rice Pudding

I've decided to take a short break from my chicken and egg series. I'm sure this will be disappointing to my huge reader base (Hi Nicole, Hi Jen). Ok, it probably isn't huge, but I think it was bigger before my chicken habitat post. My husband was actually not able to finish it. I am mystified that he didn't find riveting my discussion of caged vs. cage-free vs. free-range hens.

Anyway...

I have a 19 month old baby. In general, babies drink a lot of milk. This baby drank a huge amount of milk until about 3 weeks ago. As you might guess, I took great pains in making a milk choice for him. I'm not completely resolved in my decision (there will, of course, be an entry about milk and cows sometime), but for now, we get milk delivered weekly from the Longmont Dairy. It's local, it's fresh, and it comes in glass bottles, so there isn't any waste.

For a while, I thought this was great, until I realized, what do you do if you don't use all the milk? Normal grocery-store-milk-buying-folk would only buy what they need and go to the store again mid-week if they needed more. But when you have it delivered, you really need to predict what you'll need.

So about three weeks ago, my son went on a milk strike. Now one would think that I would simply call the dairy and have the milk stopped. That's what an organized person would do. Unfortunately all my organization gets used up at work, which is why I keep forgetting to call. Three weeks later, our fridge has 4 gallons of untouched milk. I pumped breastmilk for my son for eight long months. Every time I open the fridge, I remember that and think about the work those cows put into those 4 gallons of milk. I just can't bring myself to throw it away.

So what can you make with a whole cowload of milk?

Earlier today, I started making yoghurt. It's growing as we speak. I'll update tomorrow on the deliciousness and nutritiousness of my homemade yoghurt.

Then I had another brilliant idea... rice pudding. My son loves rice, and he loves dessert! I'll get milk in him yet, by making him rice pudding.

Using my trusty Ballymaloe Cookery Course cookbook, I got started.

Now this is a pretty simple recipe, which I will paraphrase. Put 2 oz short grain white rice, 1 oz sugar and a knob of butter into a pie pan. Pour over 1 pint of boiling milk. Bake at 350 for 1 to 1.5 hours until the skin on top is golden and the rice underneath is cooked and creamy.

The only white rice I had was arborio rice for risotto. What the heck, I'll see if I can make it with brown rice and just cook it longer. That'll give it the added bonus of being secretly whole grain. Surely an hour and a half is long enough to cook brown rice. I know white rice only takes 10 minutes as compared to 45 for brown rice, but I bet the extra time in this recipe is just to make the milk thicken up and isn't actually needed to cook the rice. In the back of my mind, I heard the haunting advice my sister (of the successful piecrust) has given me many times, "Don't make substitutions to a recipe until you've tried it at least once."

Using a scale to measure out the rice, I realized that 2 oz of rice is a tiny amount, about half a cup. This couldn't be right. Brown rice normally cooks with a slightly greater than 2 to 1 water to rice ratio. Surely 4 to 1 would make rice/milk soup. So as I measured out the rice, I threw in an extra handful, or maybe two. Probably about 3/4 cup rice in all.

I popped it in the oven. An hour later, I looked in - very nice. Golden layer on top, carmel, bread-like smell. I thought I'd better check the rice's progress. To say that it was crunchy was an understatement. You couldn't actually tell that it had started cooking. Is the boiling point of milk lower than water? That possibility hadn't occurred to me. It's too late to turn back now. Just keep cooking it.

An hour later, the layer on top is no longer "golden." More like burnt umber - I don't actually know what color that is, but the burnt part sounds accurate. Uh oh, the milk is completely gone. And the rice is definitely not cooked yet. Maybe I should have used the recommended quantities.

I added quite a bit more milk (I have some to spare), kept cooking and checking.

After 3 hours, I finally decided to throw in the towel. The pudding had cooked so long that the rice on top had dried out and gone crunchy. Or was that the dark, dark brown milk crunching - I couldn't quite tell. The rice underneath was pretty much cooked - albeit al dente style.

I pulled it out with just enough time to give one hastily blown-cool bite to the intended baby recipient before putting him to bed. Thumbs down - bummer.

At least I made a dent in the milk. Even better news, as I was looking for the recipe to reference for this post, I found a recipe for homemade butter. I'm Definitely going to try that. Unfortunately it uses cream instead of milk. Hmm, now I just need a recipe for making cream from milk.

Easy as Pie?

Mmmmm, pie. I love pie. I am one of those people that craves dessert, pretty much all the time. I usually count down the hours in the day until I have an excuse to eat some sort of dessert. I can't do it too early, or the craving will resurface before I go to bed, which means I'll want another dessert. I have a love/hate relationship with desserts. I love to eat them, but I hate to gain weight, so it's a thin line I walk between the two.

When I think about the desserts I crave the most, the ones the rank the highest are sweet and fatty ... rich chocolate cake, pain au chocolate (dessert disguised as breakfast), and pie. Every kind of pie

Unfortunately, the reality is that most pie lets me down. As I picture the pie I'm going to eat, I think about biting into a buttery, tender, flaky, slightly sweet pastry. But most restaurants and stores don't sell pie this good, at least the crust doesn't measure up. This is when most people turn to their own kitchen, after all what sounds better than homemade pie

Actually, most pie tastes better than mine. I'm not an amazing cook or anything, but most of the time when I bother to bake something at home, it's better than what you can buy out. Perfect example ... chocolate chip cookies (Nestle tollhouse back of the bag recipe). They are delicious, and well, as easy as ... pie. Is that an expression? Because I don't get it. Pie is NOT easy

My pie sucks. Specifically, my pie crust is terrible. I've tried every recipe I can find. I've listened to all kinds of advice.

For a long time, I stuck with the Joy of Cooking's method. After all, six pages of 8 point font (no pictures) explaining how to make pie crust in painstaking detail. Surely if I follow their directions exactly, I can make "A light, flaky crust that shatters at the touch of a fork."¹ That sounds perfect.

Making pie crust seems to be this infuriating contradiction of mix, but don't mix too much. Add ice cold water to a crumbly mix of butter and flour, but don't add too much or you'll make it tough.

I thought I'd try their food processor recipe, which they swear by, to quickly zap all the ingredients without melting them by using my hands.

Strangely, every time I make it, I seem to need almost twice as much water as the recipe says. As mentioned, adding too much water is a big no-no, so I'm always afraid to add more. But when I go to roll the dough out (after carefully refrigerating for an hour, of course), it's basically a big pile of flour and butter. I get it rolled out into a beautiful circle, then the minute I pick it up, it falls apart into, well the big file of flour and butter that it is. This is usually followed by profanity and then tears.

Next, I borrowed The Perfect Pie from my sister, who makes great pie. An entire cookbook completely devoted to pie.

This recipe definitely sounded more promising. Instead of being just flour, butter, salt and water, it had more ingredients. "The egg yolk contains natural lecithin, which helps make the dough easy to handle, and the lemon juice or vinegar slows development of the gluten to ensure a tender crust."² My other crust (pile of crumbs) was definitely tender, but not at all easy to handle. This sounded better.

Although, I will say that this recipe calls for shortening (Crisco), definitely Not Real Food (NRF). I'll use butter instead.

Same results. Big pile of crumbs. Infuriating. My sister was there, she says I definitely need to add more water, whether it seems like too much or not.

Ok, finally, I thought I'd try my favorite, infallible The Art of Simple Food³ by Alice Waters. She can do no wrong, so definitely her pie crust will be great. It was back to the same basic ingredients as the Joy of Cooking, but she says to just mix it up with a fork.

Alright, I'll add enough water for it to stick, mix it gently with a fork, and voila, perfect, tender crust.

I first cut the butter and salt into the flour, until it resembled peas, just as instructed. I made sure my water was ice cold, then gently stirred it in until the dough just started to clump. Then I compressed it into a ball which I refrigerated for an hour.

As I rolled it out between two sheets of parchment paper, it definitely seemed more dough-like. I had a little flash of doubt when I noticed that there were patches of dough that seemed a little wet and sticky, but they passed when I was happily able to lift the dough into the pan without it falling apart. That was a first for me.



This particular pie was pumpkin, my last pumpkin of the season. I prebaked the shell, then put in the filling. When the pie came out, you might say it looked a little rustic. I couldn't wait for it to cool, mmm.

Alas, this story does not have a happy ending. This pie crust ranks down there as one of the worst I've ever made, not an easy feat. The crust was so hard, that when I tried to cut the first bite with the edge of my fork, I had to press so hard that the pie flipped off the plate face down onto my shirt. Note the whipped cream in the photo.

I've never been desperate enough to think this before ... maybe next time I'll see what Martha Stewart has to say.


¹ Rombauer, Irma S., Rombauer Becker, Marion, and Becker, Ethan. The All New All Purpose Joy of Cooking (New York: Scribner, 1997)
² Purdy, Susan G. The Perfect Pie: More than 125 All-Time Favorite Pies and Tarts (New York: Broadway Books, 2000)
³ Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution (New York: Clarkson Potter/Publishers, 2007)