Happy Mutants food and drink topic (Part 1)

I’ve only done salmon misoyaki or sakekasu in the past. You’ve inspired me!

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This is my favourite cake. It’s like a spicy gingerbread cake with a crisp cheesecake-style base. And it smells amazing.

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How about the rich variety of drizzle cakes?

Example:

The basic recipe can be varied with all sorts of flavours. Lime works just as well, ditto orange. You can bake fruits into the cake if you like - raspberries always go well.

Or something like this:

Again basic principle can be varied depending on what fruit you have available.

Can all be made non-dairy/vegan by replacing the dairy with non-dairy equivalents.

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Spring’s weather has been all over the shop so my cooking has been too. This has been a wet, cold week so chicken, mushroom and bacon pie it is. And I made about 8 litres of chicken stock for the freezer.

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I can’t believe I forgot this:

Parsnip cake…

Seriously excellent. Basically exactly the same recipe as for carrot cake just with parsnips.

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:thinking: Could it work with radishes? I hear @Wanderfound has a lot of them :slight_smile: :wink:

(I’m actually partly-serious. If I had some radishes, I would try it just to see! I’m only finding recipes for things like savory radish pancakes, though.)

That reminds me of a recipe for Sauerkraut German Chocolate Cake that a coworker once gave me. I tried it but was disappointed that you couldn’t notice the sauerkraut in it. I think the proportion of sauerkraut wasn’t that big, compared to the proportion of carrots typically in a carrot cake (speaking of carrot cake, as we were). Basically I think the sauerkraut just added some bulk and moisture to it.

May I ask you what vinegar does for chocolate cake, i.e., what is it that makes you love chocolate cakes that use a bit of vinegar? Would I need a special recipe, or could I just sub some vinegar for some of the liquid in a recipe that I already use?

Hmm…now that I think of it, if there’s milk in the recipe, the vinegar would sour the milk, so the result might be similar to using sour cream? …yum :yum:

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That crust looks amazing! Just standard pastry dough, or do you have a trick?

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I don’t know if it’s particular to the vinegar, but most recipes I’ve seen that use some end up in a rather light textured cake that isn’t overly sweet. So, fluffy and kind of refreshing instead of some of the denser, more sugary varieties of chocolate cake.
I love chocolate, but generally I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so I like a cake that lets you taste the chocolate without drowning it in sugar, and so far every vinegar cake recipe I’ve tried does that. You might be onto something with the sour cream or buttermilk thought. But not all of them use milk, so not sure what it is.
And I don’t know about subbing vinegar into a regular recipe, just for the things mentioned above. I’d have to compare a couple recipes I think. But you can find tons of vinegar cake recipes, so maybe start there?
Shoot, I had a good recipe I cut out of a magazine that I was going to steer you towards but I just looked and it must’ve gotten discarded. :frowning:

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That sounds lovely :slight_smile:

I have an IRL friend for whom this would be perfect :slight_smile: Thanks!

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Anyone want to speculate on what the knight is feeding to the tiger in this tweet from the Medieval paintings of animals that look nothing like real animals because the artist had never seen them post?

I say mince pies :slight_smile:
Perhaps old, stale mince pies? Or would you give a tiger your best mince pies, in order to get on its good side?

What else might they be? Any guesses?

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Beef wellington


Photo courtesy of Go Epicurista Epic Beef Wellington - Go Epicurista

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Ha, ha! I like that guess!

I was about to propose “edibles” in the form of pot brownies, but then remembered that they didn’t have chocolate :frowning:

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Alas, the one part I can’t take credit for. It’s frozen butter puff from the supermarket!

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I wouldn’t think so. Carrot cake comes out of using carrots to add sweetness where sugar is lacking. Way, way back before commercial sugar was commonly available. And for the recipes we use today during wartime rationing when sugar was short, but there was a surplus of dehydrated carrots people needed to figure out how to use. Which is why many carrot cake recipes come out sorta damp, they weren’t developed for use with fresh carrots.

Radishes don’t have much sugar in them, and though they’re good cooked they’re pretty mild tasting. I don’t know that they’d bring a lot besides wetness.

Adding vinegar would change the ratio of acid to base for leavening. With a quick look it seems like most vinegar chocolate cake recipes use baking soda and natural cocoa powder (which is an acid on it’s own). So it would make sense if the vinegar allowed you to get more leavening, by balancing more baking soda out than the cocoa powder itself could. Letting you make a lighter cake.

I’d also note that chocolate, as in like bar chocolate, has a fair bit of acid in it’s flavor as well. So extra acid would make a cocoa powder based recipe taste more like whole chocolate.

I’m gonna go with a pomegranate. Just cause every time I try to guess what that weird food or plant is in the ancient art it turns out to be a pomegranate.

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Well, they originally had meat in them, so best go with your best mince pies!

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I just sampled my pickled radishes.

  1. Tasty! Success!
  2. Perhaps not quite so much garlic next time (I put a clove in each jar…).

Should go nicely in salads, in pasta sauce, in…

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Just don’t use tiger meat!

I like to use the brand (None Such) of store-bought mincemeat that my mother used when I was growing up, which does have beef in it, though it’s listed after the words Contains 2% Or Less Of:, along with salt and spices, so obviously it’s not much beef. I suppose it makes enough of a difference that they keep it in there?

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Fascinating! Thanks for that bit of food history, and the chemistry behind the vinegar cakes.

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Figs?

But yeah, pomegranates is usually the answer.

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Saturdays are My Big Day in the Kitchen day.
started out with a quick pepper pickle. had some of my jalapenos that needed to be dealt with while waiting on another batch on the vine now.
Vinegar, salt, Mexican oregano, peppercorns and black mustard seeds make the pickling broth. poured over sliced jalapenos, onion and carrot chips!


Then, out to the grill for a couple of fat pork chops, marinated overnight in mango nectar and Jamaican hot curry powder. with “baby bello” portabello mushroom caps, stuffed with white cheddar, bacon and pepper jack cheese, some honey gold potatoes. pork chop topped with mango habanero salsita:

damn, I love My Big Day in the Kitchen days!

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