Sweets

Hurricane Strudel

Well, the Frankenstorm is raging outside; in an effort to stave off cabin fever (since I’m now officially stuck home tomorrow as well), I decided to take on some projects. I replaced the buttons on the vintage cape I bought last month. And I made strudel. And I cleaned my house. Thankfully, I made strudel before I cleaned – this is not an un-messy baking project.


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Taffy Tastes of Summer

First off, please observe the amazingness of my blue milk glass hob nail compote dish-cum-candy bowl. Next, please cast your eye upon the homemade salt water taffy therein. It is rose-flavored.


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Indian Pudding

Food can be central to a novel – to interactions, to evocations of scenery. Some writers, however, focus their attention on other details. Amongst them, Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex (one of my favorite books), and of my book club’s January pick: The Marriage Plot. I volunteered to hostess and cook for our meeting this month, and I was having trouble coming up with a thematic dish. If we’d been doing dress-up, Eugenides’ discussion of 1980s Betsey Johnson would have been a perfect stepping-off spot. For food, though, I wound up resorting to location, and taking inspiration from two major settings: New England and Calcutta. I found a recipe for indian pudding with apples in Rain, Hail, and Baked Beans – a 1958 “New England Seasonal Cook Book.” To this classic, I added spices inspired by a Bengali apple chutney recipe; I made an Indian indian pudding.


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Watermelon Granita on the Half Shell

One of the reasons I originally got into vintage cookbooks: I have a strange fascination with foods that are shaped to look like their ingredients.  Think salmon mousse in fish molds, deviled eggs; give me off-color picture plates of these, and I’ll be happy.  Until I came across this recipe in The Dallas Junior League Cookbook, however, I never thought of the absolutely flat-out genius idea of making watermelon-esque watermelon granita.  I might have thought of serving such a dish in a watermelon shell, but I’d never have gone the extra step and added chocolate “seeds.”  And the world would have been poorer for it, because this is awesome.


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