It typically includes a couple tablespoons of cocoa, either buttermilk or vinegar, and one or two ounces of red food coloring. There was a time a few years ago when a number of my friends developed a mania for RVC and requested that I make it all the time for birthdays and holidays and etc. It's gross to make (dumping in all that food color) and in my opinion doesn't taste all that great.
There is this stuff for if you want to pretend that "red velvet" is a flavor.
I've only had a few bites here and there and never been impressed, but maybe I'd like a beetier version better.
Red Vervet Cake is made of monkeys.
I have asked multiple people and they just say it is chocolate cake which is red for no particular reason.
More mysterious is "champagne cake". Recipes for that are all over the map in terms of ingredients.
I never liked it much. I think I'm being childish -- the huge amount of food coloring sort of grosses me out, and I've talked myself into thinking I can taste it. But even in the absence of a weird food-coloring taste, there's not much flavor otherwise.
It seems a bit richer than chocolate to me, I can taste a difference between them if I try, but I agree, I'd be surprised by someone who expressed a strong preference for one but not the other.
It's not chocolate, it's just-barely-chocolate. Much less than you'd flavor an actually chocolate cake with.
Blue Velvet Cake uses nitrous for leavening.
the huge amount of food coloring sort of grosses me out, and I've talked myself into thinking I can taste it
This is my belief, too.
I'd be interested in a purely-beet-colored recipe (not very interested, but if someone wanted me to make them an RVC, I'd be googling for beets.)
I'd be interested in a purely-beet-colored recipe
I researched this (or maybe tried it?) a few years back, and I think that beet juice will actually cook to yellow when baked into a cake.
11 -- Here you go. The secret to a nice beet-colored cake is BEETS. Although frankly I think this looks (a) gross and (b) not paleo.
Chocolate-beet cake is indeed very tasty, and IME it is not yellow unless you have yellow beets.
Red food coloring is just insect shells or whatever, right?
I don't understand why you would want a cake with a little chocolate in it when you could have a cake with a lot of chocolate in it.
I don't understand why you'd want a cake with a lot of chocolate in it when you could just smear chocolate all over yourself.
I am pretty sure that in four years of posting here, I've never gotten so much unanimous OP agreement. This may be my high-water mark as a blogger.
I don't understand why you'd want to smear chocolate all over yourself when there's mud to wallow in.
I don't understand why you'd want to just smear chocolate all over yourself when you could smear chocolate and yams all over yourself.
19: Actually I quite like red velvet cake.
Hey, has anyone here made a beet pie? I was planning to go with some sort of grapefruit meringue for this year's pie contest, figuring that oddness is a plus, but I am always up for beets, though probably no one else would be.
22: Yeah but you didn't like it in the first 20 comments. Record set!
I've enjoyed the red velvet cakes I've had in the past.
Oh, now everyone's a contrarian. I'm sticking to my win.
I've never heard of a beet pie before but it sounds verrrrry interesting. Beet-walnut pie?
BEET-PINE NUT PIE????
That's weird; in the past ISTR wikipedia saying it was named that way because red sugar was another name for brown sugar.
BEET, SOUR CHERRY, AND WALNUT PIE???????
Like, a beet custard pie like pumpkin or sweet potato? Never heard of it, but it could work.
I think I must not ever have had good beets.
Either a custard pie, or else cubed into like a pecan pie?
I never liked beets until I had them in non-pickled-beet form (which was not all that long ago -- certainly in my thirties). Sour is good with them, they're too sweet without something to cut it, but I'm not crazy about vinegar generally. Baked with goat cheese, though, they're awesome, or with a lime dressing.
I've neither eaten nor made a beet pie, but I could see it going a lot of ways. I've made a beet-sour cream-horseradish dish before that I could mess around with to turn into a pie filling plus use my own horesradish in, or something more like a sweet beet-ginger pie along the lines of LB's suggestions (with yogurt, maybe? goat cheese?) and nosflow's immediate turn toward nuts sounds good too, maybe something that could go in the crust. I'm just looking for excuses to cook a bunch of beets in the next month or so, I guess.
heebie, the best beets I've ever had were at a restaurant in Austin, but not Tex-Mex or Interior Mexican one. (Peché)
Beets, tarragon, sour cherries, and something acidic is a good combination.
So, like a chinese restaurant or something?
The buttermilk and vinegar makes for a fine texture. It's a lot of food coloring, but I like the way it looks and I think it tastes good, though not better than all other kinds of cakes. I don't think it counts as a chocolate cake.
Sour cherry juice and bourbon is a good drink. I'm not sure I could add beets and spin that into a pie, but again the experiments might be fun.
I've made a beet-sour cream-horseradish dish before that I could mess around with to turn into a pie filling plus use my own horesradish in
Beet-horseradish pie doesn't sound immediately appealing.
Cripes, yeah, I'm not digging through these millions of links for you all. Here, have at it.
I thought it was red *because* it was barely chocolate, so that without artificial coloring it would be an unappealing grubby old sneakers color.
I think I must not ever have had good beets.
You'll have to come over sometime when M/tch makes something with fresh beets (as in freshly picked that morning). They're not like beets you've ever had before.
Candied beets *and* grapefruit in a merengue?
51: I thought about that, too, and it does sound kind of appealing!
The buttermilk and vinegar makes for a fine texture.
I've decided that churning your own butter is the next huge foodie fad, and that I'm going to get rich by selling hand-crafted butter-churn stand-mixer attachments on Esty.
Red-velvet cake may be the perfect solution to the attendant "what do you do with all this goddamn buttermilk" problem.
I think 'buttermilk' isn't the fluid left over when you churn milk into butter -- it's something more like yogurt, but with different bacteria.
I am positive that buttermilk is the fluid left over when you churn milk into butter.
Wikipedia:
Buttermilk (right) compared to fresh milk (left). The thicker buttermilk leaves a more visible residue on the glass.
Buttermilk, low fat Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)
Energy 169 kJ (40 kcal)
Carbohydrates 4.8 g
Fat 0.9 g
Protein 3.3 g
Calcium 116 mg (12%)
Percentages are relative to
US recommendations for adults.
Buttermilk refers to a number of dairy drinks. Originally, buttermilk was the liquid left behind after churning butter out of cream. This type of buttermilk is known as traditional buttermilk.
The term buttermilk also refers to a range of fermented milk drinks, common in warm climates (e.g., the Middle East, Pakistan, India, and the Southern United States) where unrefrigerated fresh milk sours quickly,[1] as well as in colder climates, such as Germany, Poland, Scandinavia and the Netherlands. This fermented dairy product known as cultured buttermilk is produced from cow's milk and has a characteristically sour taste caused by lactic acid bacteria. This variant is made using one of two species of bacteriaeither Streptococcus lactis or Lactobacillus bulgaricus, which creates more tartness.
I totally meant for all that nutritional crud to be there.
11: It was while making a beet-ish RVC that I blended my finger the year before last.
But the stuff that you buy in the supermarket and that recipes call for is the other kind -- the fermented stuff rather than the leftover from churning stuff. And I don't think they're similar, or substitute for each other, at all.
57: creating a rust-red, iron-rich cake!
When I churn butter at home, it sure as hell seems like buttermilk. But I haven't actually tasted it to be sure, because buttermilk is gross.
I have, however, allowed some to ferment in my refrigerator...
Also, I'm guessing buttermilk pancakes use "traditional" rather than "fermented" buttermilk, because traditional buttermilk is a byproduct that the pancake mix companies can probably get fairly cheap.
"what do you do with all this goddamn buttermilk"
Fried chicken and biscuits. We get through a quart every couple of weeks.
It appears that fermented buttermilk is just an imitation of traditional buttermilk, which I guess I've never had.
Come cook for me, L.
61: Where I come from buttermilk pancakes aren't made from a mix.
Also, pour over rice and eat with lentils and lime pickle, yum.
My godmother was always known for her red velvet cake, so I had it a lot growing up. The most distinctive part of her version is the frosting, which I think must be the ermine frosting. I am pretty sure when I was younger she used margarine instead of butter, in that weird midwestern "butter and margarine are just the same and can be used completely interchangeably" sort of way. When I had it sometime in the past year or two, it was the first time she'd made it with butter in who knows how long. So. Much. Butter. And not really in a good way; the texture of the frosting is kind of gross and oily.
If my memory of Alton Brown's episode is right, original red-velvet cake was red due to the unprocessed cocoa interacting with an acid like buttermilk. But it's a pain to get a hold of unprocessed cocoa; dutch processed or extra dark have already been oxidized and won't react properly.
I've recently grown fond of beets as a veggie--I've even gotten my wife on board for them on a somewhat regular basis. The way they stain everything, they've got to be red enough to be Red Velvet making.
But also, my boyfriend has been known to drink the stuff. I'm not sure if this is an eastern European thing, or a northern New Jersey thing (they serve it at this place near his hometown).
or a northern New Jersey thing
Both of my northern New Jersey-raised grandfathers drank buttermilk. I figured it was an old Jewish man thing, but who knows.* I also wonder if the buttermilk I remember them drinking was the real thing, or the cultured buttermilk you get nowadays.
Re: beet cake, for those of you in or planning to descend on DC, this place has very good beet cake (and, from time to time, other worthwhile beet preparations). A bit off the beaten path though.
*Every now and then I try it, to see whether I have become a sufficiently old Jewish man. Same thing with Cel-Ray soda. Apparently I'm not quite there yet.
Where I come from buttermilk pancakes aren't made from a mix.
I usually just make regular pancakes, sans buttermilk. But all the mixes seem to market themselves as buttermilk pancakes. Or buckwheat, which just makes for weird-ass pancakes.
My brother is actually a miller, and when I get his pancake mix - organic, hippie, no-buttermilk, extra-rye grain shit - it is The Kind.
Blue Velvet Cake uses nitrous for leavening.
Velvet Underground Cake is made with heroin and a banana.
National Velvet cake is made from horse meat seasoned with Elizabeth Taylor fragrance.
Velvet Revolution Cake is served on a turntable.
Velveteen Cake is made from discarded plushies.
Red Velveeta cake is made with cheese and emulsifiers.
Black Velvet cake is made with Guinness and champagne.
Black Velvet cake is... a new religion that will bring you to your knees?
Velvet Elvis cake is made with peanut butter and bananas.
Velvet Glove cake is actually just a slab of iron.
Recommended for giving to family members in prison.
Velvet Revolver cake is made up of pieces of other, somewhat better cakes.
Red Vulva Cake is riot grrls.
Traditional, left-over-from butter buttermilk usually was also fermented, because it's hard to keep milk fresh. Butter and ghee are more durable and therefore market goods; the buttermilk stayed on the farm and was a rural prop and/or delicacy. The hogs often got a lot of it.
(Cheese: milk's leap toward immortality.)
Smitten Kitchen has a recipe for a red velvet cake that uses red wine rather than red food coloring. It's not especially red, it should be noted, but who cares because OMFG CHOCOLATE WINE CAKE and it is spectacular.
Velveteen Rabbit cake is sad and nostalgic and also made with rabbit.
Buttermilk is gross. And that's coming from someone who likes nattō.
So this is a generalized food thread now, right? Who among you has made pad Thai? It should be simple, but it turns out that getting the sauce and the consistency of the noodles right is challenging.
Brer Rabbit cake doesn't want to be thrown into that brier patch.
85: ...and deciding whether to serve it flambé is tough.
Frankly, my dear, nobody gives a damn what's in Rhett Vutler cake.
I'm a tiny bit surprised to learn that red velvet has been around since peoples' grandparents' day. I had never heard of the stuff before seeing it in bakeries specializing in cupcakes, which are new to me and I gather a fad in general.
I think it's a southern thing. Seeing it in the rest of the country is maybe the last fifteen years or so?
I always asked for it for birthdays when I was a kid because red.
I always asked for ice cream cake rolls because holy shit ice cream AND cake in one? There was no greater dessert in the land to my eight year old self.
Funnily enough, I'm making pad Thai because my daughters asked for it for their birthday this Saturday. It's their fave.
There was a bakery a few blocks away from us where we used to get rye bread, rolls, and jelly doughnuts for weekend breakfasts, that always had pastry frogs in the window case next to the rectangular pink cakes labeled Rum in brown cursive. I always wanted a frog, but never communicated it to anyone, and then the bakery went out of business when I was in high school.
Later, I found out that a close friend in high school who had also grown up in the neighborhood traditionally got a frog on his birthday every year until the bakery closed. I hated him a little when he told me that.
Soaking the noodles is a little tricky. Also, in my experience people are used to a sweeter sauce than recipes generally call for. Anyway, I like to add more sugar.
Oh also, if we're talking about cooking, I am making creme brulee, but I don't have a handheld torch. Is this a fool's errand? I have a gas broiler, and I figured if I refrigerate the custards till they're good and cold, and put them in an ice water bath before I put them in the oven, and also move the rack up real close to the flame, it might be okay? Should I keep the oven door open and hold the pan right up to the fire? Will I be serving caramel pudding for dessert?
You don't need a handheld torch. You can get the same effect with a lighter and a bottle of styling mousse.
National Velvet cake is the next item to be recalled from British supermarket shelves made from horse meat seasoned with Elizabeth Taylor fragrance .
There ought to be more hearty cakes. The fibrous stuff helps the stomach handle the sweet. Why haven't humans figured this out yet?
100: Heh. I don't understand that story at all, though. How can horsemeat be cheaper than cow (in large enough quantities to show up in supermarkets)? I mean, I understand that horses die, but the horse population has to be tiny compared to the cow population.
101: You have clearly missed my endless droning on about Buck's fruitcake. Hearty isn't even the word.
The horse burger scandal has produced weeks of amusing puns.
Yes, I must have missed that. IMO there's no type of cake that hearty ingredients would not improve.
re: 90
[Not really the same sort of story, but ...]
The BBC had some story about a guy who beat up three knife-wielding attackers, while holding his chips in one hand (as in fish and chips) all without spilling them.
Amusing if true, but the story reads like such total bullshit I'm surprised it passed the most cursory scrutiny.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-21410565
When it's the hospital who has to call the cops on a stabbing because the stabbee won't it's invariably a drug deal gone bad or a trick roll. (as in he thought he was getting a prostitute and got robbed instead)
I made butter a couple weeks ago. FWIW, a quart of heavy cream makes about a pound and a half of butter and enough buttermilk for one medium batch of pancakes. Next up: Euro-style fermented butter.
re: 107
Yup, and the detail about the wife's call/txt to remind him to be careful at the exact moment he got attacked is exactly the sort of unnecessary additional element of coincidence that people who are confabulating some bullshit story add in. As is the thing with the chips. Plus aikido is, famously, an art that's really big on booting fuckers in the knees. Especially aikido the person did twenty plus years before. Or, completely not.
49 seems like an interesting hypothesis.
86: amusing, if not helpful, instructions
Also, heebie in the OP has never been righter.
111: Such a great concept, but his recipes tend to be crap. Tomato? Peanut butter? Learn to cook, vegan metal dude.
108 is further evidence that the make-your-own-butter trend is already sweeping the nation. I just know there is a fortune to be made.
Tell me, Chopper, are you in the market for an artisanally-crafted butter churn attachment for your stand mixer? Its the perfect thing for all your butter-churning-related program activity needs.
crême brulee doesn't need a blowtorch, that's just some bullshit that expensive kitchen gear people are trying to tell you. yeah get them cold and all, and then heat up the broiler and broil'em. also, red velvet cake is OK though not my favorite? but I like it better when it's made into 4 layers.
thorn: I've made grapefruit pavlova and it was well received--that's just meringue discs and grapefruit curd. I did one with pomegranate also; pomegranate curd is nice and you can use the pom juice. it would require corn starch etc to set up, but sure. I'm...dubious on the beets slightly. no, if you got fresh beet juice with ginger and then made beet meringue pie (with lemon in it) I bet it would be delish.
Part of the reason red velvet cake tastes different than chocolate cake is the color. Not that the food coloring itself alters the flavor directly; but the fact that it appears red changes the way we perceive the chocolate.
The important thing about buttermilk in buttermilk pancakes is that the acid reacts with baking soda to fluffen them up.
114.2: Do you mean a whisk attachment to a hand mixer? Because that's supposedly all it takes.
118: I couldn't decide between leaven and fluff up, so I lazied up and portmanteaued the fuck out of my indecision.
114: Sorry,I used the ridiculously expensive food processor I got my wife for Christmas. Worked like a charm in just a few minutes.
Do you mean a whisk attachment to a hand mixer? Because that's supposedly all it takes.
Yeah, you could do that. But if you use a common whisk, you get common butter. You get much richer flavor and enhanced spreadablity if you use a purpose-built stand-mixer-attachment, lovingly hand-crafted out of titanium and oak.
I had assumed red velvet cake caught on despite not being all that interesting as cake because it was a delivery system for cream cheese frosting that did not involve carrot cake and the main good thing about carrot cake was cream cheese frosting so it was the best of all possible cake worlds.
92: I think it's a southern thing. Seeing it in the rest of the country is maybe the last fifteen years or so?
Waldorf-Astoria Red Velvet Cake also starred in one variant of a hoary urban legend (which more recently is generally told as the Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe).
Rising and rising is the fluffening cake,
Unnoticed by its chef; the first mistake,
thin, falls apart; the pancake dissipates;
A soggy mess is loosed upon their plates,
The leavened tide is loosed; and everywhere
A chorus of breakfasters moans:
The best are kitchen-eaten, while the worst
are over-buttermilked and soda-baked.
Surely some patisserie is nearby;
Surely a pot of coffee is at nearby.
A pot of coffee? Hardly! It seems we're out.
Then a strange image out of World Cooking
troubles my soul; somewhere for paying customers
A shape with chocolate body and a red complexion,
A name twee and meaningless as a hum,
is made into cupcakes, while all about it
its brethren are sold to the most indignant customers
for four dollars and change; but now I know
that thirty tourists lined around the corner
were lured here by a television show,
and what lump of sugared dough, its hour come round,
slouches toward Williamsburg to be born?
A good review and history of the cake from a 2007 NYTimes article. (And it is in fact primarily associated with the South.)
I recently saw and bought some Red Velvet Fudge. No idea how it differed from just plain Fudge other than the color.
Fluffers are often essential to second comings.
In 2009 I attended and played guitar for a wedding whose cake was an armadillo-shaped red velvet, as in Steel Magnolias. I don't remember it tasting like anything, but the bride told such an impassioned story about desiring this cake from a movie she'd seen when she was 12 that I took it as a very, very endearing instance of trend for trend's sake. Plus, you know, armadillo.
Playing the Lohengrin march on guitar and banjo was a hoot.
The bride and groom's first Christmas letter was a photo essay of them destroying/devouring a fairly accurate gingerbread replica of Pyongyang, so obviously a good match.
125: here I am, not pasting in the orson wells golf clap gif. but I'm totally doing it. for real, in my empty store.
my first customers coming into the store for the day (who must buy or else I must wash them away with water) were also my first customers of the lunar new year (so they extra super needed to buy something.) and it was my ultimate cocktease indian client, who has taken up hours of my time in the past as he serially and convincingly pretended to want to buy everything in the store. and he brought his wife, often a sign someone will really buy, but I was having none of it. but they bought! something for $25 dollars, but the superstitions, not being sentient, can't count, so I get a pass. woo year of the snake!
Pad Thai update: via my new blog crush, an excruciatingly thorough approach (you have to be sure to read the whole series). She and jms are right, the challenge is in the noodles. But tonight's pad Thai was pretty good.
Pad Thai update: via my new blog crush, an excruciatingly thorough approach (you have to be sure to read the whole series).
Hey, I was just reading her recipe for massaman curry the other day.
Today I began a two-day (because I don't want to spend all night tomorrow after work) process of making a pear and frangipane tart, possibly to include candied kumquats as well. Today was the frangipane (totally delicious) and pâté sablée. If nothing else works out at least the frangipane part will be aces.
Reading the post on ingredients for pad thai, I stumbled over this sentence: "There are two types of preserved radishes: one is salty (hua chai po khem หัวไชโป๊วเค็ม) and one is on the sweet side (hua chai po wan หัวไชโป้วหวาน). The latter is preferred."
In particular, I noticed that the two terms given in Thai script differ only at the right-hand sides, and that I expected, when I looked at their transliterations, for the transliterations to differ on the left-hand sides. Conclusion: Thai script looks vaguely Hebraic/Arabic to me, so I instinctively scanned it right-to-left.
I asked the waitress in a Thai place about the directionality one time. The table voted to condemn that move.
According to my BiL, who used to be married to a Thai and was quite fluent at one time, it's derived ultimately from Sanskrit. It mainly goes left to right, but the vowels and tone markers follow complicated rules of their own that he wasn't inclined to try to explain.
||
I don't think "She was a replicant" is going to work as an alibi.
|>
So Red Velvet Cake:cream cheese frosting::Snails:melted butter?
silly neb! yes it's derived from sanskrit so it goes all normal, the exceptions being (draws in breath) that certain vowel marks must appear before the consonants they follow in speech (just like sanskrit there so no issues). um. rather quite a few vowels. anyway, I don't think they mark tones? it's like chinese, you just have to know.
Thai writing is pretty weird - it is Indic in origin, an abugida, but Indic languages don't have tones, and that complicates the basic system. There are four tone markings, but different letters for the same consonants have different inherent tones when unmarked and the tone markings can mean different tones when applied to them. Lots of memorization.
Also some vowels have to be written before the consonant they follow in speech, some diphthongs have components both before and after the consonant, and syllable-final n's, t's, and p's can be written with a wide variety of other letters, presumably because of archaic pronunciations.
Oh, and a lot of the short vowels are represented as diacritics above or below the initial consonant, like Hebrew but mandatory, but then the tones are also diacritics, so sometimes you have to stack diacritics.
Snails:melted butter
Two weekends ago I got escargots and grits at a restaurant and was way too full to eat them, so I put them in scrambled eggs the next day. I could taste the snails way more than I am used to, and they were surprisingly yummy!
146/7. Like I said, 'complicated rules of their own that he wasn't inclined to try to explain.'
Goddamnit, you people all suck.
Also: lourdes kayak, you're lurid keyaki, right?
151: So you can keep your "people who suck" list straight?
Oh, it's easy to keep track of set containing EVERYBODY.
I have a really hard time keeping track of which commenters don't contain themselves, though.
I once made a vegan red velvet cake for someone and it tasted so strongly (to me anyway) of food coloring that I thought it was really gross. They liked it, because the average vegan baked good is so mediocre that "tasty vegan dessert" is a low bar to clear.
Reading the Wikipedia article, though, I might want to try again with non-Dutch-process cocoa and see if I can get a natural red-brown tint and the characteristic mild chocolate flavor.
Surprisingly, you can clabber both soy and almond milks to use in place of buttermilk and the result is, in most baked goods, pretty tasty.
(The other day I made mango chutney vegan cupcakes and they were really good, people! As good as regular cake, but with mangoes.)
I am large, I contain multitudes.
They liked it, because the average vegan baked good is so mediocre that "tasty vegan dessert" is a low bar to clear.
Ain't that the truth!
mango chutney vegan cupcakes
Recipe!!!!
The idea that someone might want to avoid carrot cake is hard for me to process.
I could go for some carrot cake right now.
Goddamnit, you people all suck.
I'm not saying we don't, but why, particularly?
Recipe!!!!
This is a basic vanilla vegan cake that is, unlike many vanilla vegan cakes, pretty good. It's a recipe that I got from Vegan Chef and tweaked a little bit:
1 1/3 cups sugar - I use 1/2 white and 1/2 dark brown for a "regular" vanilla cake and all dark brown for a richer cake. Don't use gritty co-op "natural" sugar.
3 cups flour - I sometimes use 1/2 - 1 C whole wheat flour but no more than that
1/2 cup Earth Balance
1 T. baking powder
1/4 t. salt
2 cups almond milk
2 T. vanilla
(optional 1 -2 t. almond extract, cardamom extract, etc.)
(also optional - sub 1 - 2 T molasses for some of the sugar)
A half recipe makes a 9" pan. This cake needs lots of room in the pan, too. It's a heavy, moist cake - I keep meaning to fool around with subbing in some clabbered almond milk and reducing the flour a bit.
Lightly oil a 9x13-inch pan and set aside. Using an electric mixer or in a large bowl with a hand held mixer, place the sugar and Spectrum Spread, and cream together until light and fluffy. In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add dry ingredients into the creamed mixture, alternating with the soy milk, and continuing to beat the mixture well between each addition. Add the vanilla and almond extract and beat the mixture an additional 2 minutes at medium speed. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean.
To make mango chutney cupcakes: Let some frozen mango chunks thaw and then chop them into small pieces; acquire some mango chutney that is more sweet/sour than peppery/hot. Mix the mango chunks into the flour before incorporating liquids. After incorporating liquids, stir in 3- 4 T chutney for the full recipe of cake, maybe erring on the "less chutney" side the first time you make them. If the batter seems too liquid, add a little extra flour.
A half-recipe made 12 medium-big cupcakes.
These will be dense and slightly lumpy - some have alleged that they are more like muffins than cupcakes. I brushed the tops of them with a thin coat of chutney and then frosted them with vanilla frosting.
Thanks. Do you think it would work with gf flour? I'm thinking it's so gooey that you'd scarcely notice the difference.
161: I interpreted it as being a comment on our unwillingness to unanimously bring the Red Velvet Cake hate. The promising early returns did not hold up.
Do you think it would work with gf flour?
Wow, I have not baked much with gf flour - most of the better gluten-free cakes I have had have been very delicate. I'd be more inclined to find a reliable gluten-free cake recipe and then add in the chutney, possibly subbing some of the chutney for liquid, as it seems that gf cakes can be a bit fragile. Maybe chop the mango bits really small and make a chutney glaze for the top under the frosting or a chutney-vanilla frosting?
No, it was because I'd just posted about Pistorius and discovered being pwned.
164: Ah. Surely we could find something we can all agree to hate. Racism's out (Shearer), so how about traffic jams?
166: Well that's your own damn problem.
I was just innocently observing that you people all suck. Don't shoot the messenger.
I'm my own man, though I think that by Church law lurid keyaki and I are one flesh. She roped me in.
Oh, if this is the baking-without-stuff thread, what does anyone know about substituting for dairy? One of Newt's friends just sprang "I'm violently lactose intolerant now" on us after we'd already put dinner on the table: apparently it came on all of a sudden a month or two ago, but is really quite intense and he's sensitive to everything, including butter. We ended up rummaging through the fridge and feeding him hummus and leftover takeout rice and beans.
Frowner, I remember you recommending Buttery Spread as a brand name? That works one for one as butter in baking recipes? Is it okay for frosting? And are there any tricks about substituting almond/soy/rice/whatever milk? Some work, some don't? I can still use eggs, of course, so that's easy.
Also, soy cheese on pizza? Does it work, or is it gross?
166: Ah. That gave me hope that I had pwned you in the other thread on acknowledging that I had pwned that post in this thread. But sadly no, time stamps (8:02 vs. 8:07) say otherwise. Not that I'm taking any of this personally, or even care about who gets credit for bring the fresh material to the blog.
170: Huh, I figured you were one person with a drifting pseudonym. This is why I should carp at people about their pseuds even more than I do already.
173: Some people like soy cheese on pizza but I think it's gross. But Daiya is a relatively new brand of dairy-free cheese that IMO is pretty good. A vegan bakery near us makes a good dairy-free grilled cheese sandwich with it.
Oh, and Earth Balance is our non-dairy butter substitute of choice. I think you can bake with it but I'm not sure. You can certainly fry an egg in it. They have a product called "buttery spread" which may or may not be what Frowner had been referring to.
177: Their website is disturbingly free of information about what their products are made of. I mean, I'm sure whatever it is is food, but they could say, surely.
And I'm looking back at 173 and realizing that I'd completely forgotten that margarine exists -- that is, that it's not a niche product I have to find, it's the stuff right there that I've been avoiding all my life. I'd still like recommendations for brands that taste okay, but I was being mildly blind there.
173.1: I was about to go with a small "cosmic justice" dig, but I realized that it is the gluten intolerant who are all just whiners.
Their website is disturbingly free of information about what their products are made of.
Horses.
IIRC the trick to it is the pea protein. The ingredient list here seems to confirm that.
180: I am completely sympathetic to anyone with a clear reaction to gluten (or lactose). It's the people who sort of think they feel better when they avoid gluten that I suspect of being superstitious about it in an unnecessarily troublesome way.
175: That is just! It started as a one-off, but I forgot: "Choose your pseud only in accordance with that maxim through which you at the same time can will that it become a universal law."
I will eat my red velvet cake with a side of carp, and Daiya, and truncate myself. Not that I harbor ambitions to escape the set of people who suck.
183: Yes, you were quite clear on that point.
183. That seems to be right. I'm not sure where on the spectrum I place people who don't claim to be gluten intolerant but 'feel better' for avoiding wheat (but not other gluten producing grains), because I suppose they might have a mild reaction to something else in wheat. But my sympathy is stretched.
The thought pains me greatly, but I'm seriously considering a pseud change for anonymity reasons now that my niece is online. She is well aware of the Sir Kraab persona, which predates Unfogged. I'm not sure that I want everything I say here to be searchable for the rest of her/my life.
Was it someone here who said that gluten is the new al Qaeda? I had a moment of panic when my daughters revealed last night that one of their birthday party invitees is allegedly gluten-intolerant, but then I realized that the menu needed no revision, all the starchy stuff being rice-based. (How awesome are my children? When I asked what they wanted me to make for their birthday dinner, they requested onigiri, norimaki sushi, salad rolls and pad Thai.)
Buttery Spread is pretty good - can actually taste a lot like butter in many applications and now comes in frightening giant tub like it's cheap ice cream or something.
I second the "soy cheese is gross on pizza" thing.
Daiya is terrible for you - almost no nutritional content. It makes a fatally delicious American cheese-style grilled cheese sandwich, though. I can't have it in the house because I eat only grilled Daiya/tomato/stone-ground mustard sandwiches until it is all gone. But honestly, I don't think it's that good on pizza - it melts all right, but it dries out a bit and tastes rather as if you'd put American style cheese on a pizza (even the mozzarella shreds) . If you're including a vegan in pizza-based event, Amy's frozen soy cheese pizzas are mysteriously tasty and immune to many of the usual soy cheese problems - or just top the guy's pizza with roasted vegetables and nothing cheese-related. A super-carmelized-onion pizza topping is also really tasty.
I like almond milk better than other non-milk-milks.
For buttermilk, I add 1 T vinegar to 1 C fake milk.
For some applications where a parmesan-ish taste is wanted, you can add nutritional yeast. So when I make polenta, for example, I add buttery spread, olive oil and nutritional yeast to taste.
Also, I make what I consider a really good garlic/citrus/nutritional yeast pasta sauce: Mince a LOT of garlic; cook it in good amount of olive oil, enough so that the garlic is all mostly covered by oil; cook either until just fragrant or until it is almost overcooked/browned (this is actually very tasty); turn off the heat and add about 2 T nutritional yeast, salt and some fresh lemon or lime juice. Stir around and taste. Add water (preferably reserved pasta water) if it is too dry; keep correcting with the juice and nutritional yeast until it tastes as you want it to taste. This is really taste with gnocci, orzo or other non-linear pastas and it's also good on asparagus.
When I pan cook things that I want to taste buttery/savory, I usually use 1/2 buttery spread and 1/2 oil. I like onions browned this way.
188 et al -- Non Celiac Gluten Sensitivity is (likely) a real thing or at least it's not at all clear that it's not a real thing. And Celiac disease has been rising, as has the gluten content of foods consumed in the West. It's certainly over-self diagnosed but guess what products that contain gluten make you fat and weak anyway, so that's not the worst thing in the world.
I love how Halford busts out weak-website-grammar when he gets going on this topic.
No, I think lurid keyaki/lourdes kayak make a good pair namewise.
187: I'm moderately weirded out by the fact that Sally and Newt could be lurking already, or might RTFA in the future. On the other hand, there's nothing particular here I don't want them to know. (Um, hi, if you're reading this.)
I will say that I've had a couple gluten-free Thanksgiving dinners, and it's been striking that afterwards, I've felt full but not "hanging on for survival mode full", the way I usually feel after Thanksgiving.
I'm sure that if we trawl the archives we can find something here you don't want them to know.
It's the people who sort of think they feel better when they avoid gluten that I suspect of being superstitious about it in an unnecessarily troublesome way.
I must out myself as someone who does feel better when I minimize the amount of wheat that I eat, but since it doesn't make me violently ill I've never bothered to worry about whether this has something to do with actual wheat or just the fact that when I eat a lot of wheat I am usually eating less fiber, less protein and fewer vitamins - I've just stopped using bread, flour tortillas and pasta as default meal options, generally eat chocolate rather than cake-like sweets (despite the fact that I will use any gathering as an excuse to bake; I love baking) and save wheaty things for special occasions instead. I think it would be useful for many people to consider whether "I eat wheat sparingly because large quantities don't agree with me" could be substituted for "I have a sub-clinical gluten sensitivity and [unspecified bad things] will happen to me if I eat any wheat".
Also, making serious gluten-free food is a serious undertaking - you need to make sure your surfaces are clean and there's no cross-contamination, and in a non-gluten-free kitchen this is a bit tricky. That's why I'm a little suspicious of some activist situations where "there are gluten-free options" is a big deal - most of the people I know who can't eat gluten really, really can't eat gluten, and they don't eat food cooked by people who may not understand that you have to be careful of cross-contamination when preparing it, so they tend not to trust helpful little hand-lettered signs at potlucks.
Eg:
http://m.wsj.com/articles/a/SB10001424052748704893604576200393522456636?mg=reno64-wsj
193. What if they start commenting? Do they get immediate front page privileges by association?
All right, no one link anything else. I've been sitting on a related post and you're all about to pwn me. But I'm also proctoring a test and students are beginning to pop up and turn it in.
No. I explain that if their rooms aren't clean they shouldn't be commenting on blogs.
Actually, I suppose the major thing I'd be sensitive about is the objective record of the massive amounts of timewasting I do at work.
making serious gluten-free food is a serious undertaking - you need to make sure your surfaces are clean and there's no cross-contamination
Not to mention the incredible awareness you have to have about seemingly innocuous ingredients. Soy sauce? Often has gluten! Vinegar? Also often has gluten! Rice noodles? You have to make sure not to get the kind dusted in gluten-containing flour!
I also made butter a few weeks ago, as an Xmas gift for my MIL, who eats so much butter that it's gross (not only does she butter croissants, but she uses a couple tablespoons to do it).
Anyway, trad buttermilk is not acidic enough to make fluffy pancakes. Oh, and buttermilk (as a beverage) is a common accompaniment to fried fish around here.
Oh, and AB has made red velvet cake an Xmas tradition; she picked it up in her Southern childhood. I had never had it before. I like it well enough, for cream cheese icing reasons.
Yeah, Buck had me looking into making a gluten-free fruitcake for one of his employees whose wife has celiac disease, and the conclusion I arrived at was to send them something else instead -- anything he made in our kitchen (a) might make her sick, and (b) if she has any sense she wouldn't trust us, so even if we got it right she shouldn't eat it anyway.
201. Tell me about it. We have a friend who literally loses a day's work if she eats anything like that, and it's a real adventure catering for her. Plus some companies' labels are more trustworthy than others.
Ok, the new post is up. Another folk post, since I'm simultaneously answering test-related questions. Feel free to resume pwning future posts.
I know the difference between cheap supermarket butter and expensive 'European-style' butter is just fat content, that the good stuff has less water. Are all you butter-makers getting higher fat content than the cheap stuff, or is it just something you're doing for fun?
125 is fantastic. Bravo.
I am somewhat dismayed by all the beet love on display in the early part of this thread. The smell of beets activates an intense this-is-fungal-and-will-kill-you response for me, so the question of whether they're pickled (but fungal and will kill you) or in a ginger custard (but fungal and will kill you) is entirely beside the point.
Beets just taste like dirt to me. Not actively unpleasant, but also not something I'd choose to eat except to be polite.
207.first is not correct. Cultured vs. uncultured makes a huge difference in taste.
On the other hand, there's nothing particular here I don't want them to know.
There's nothing in particular,* I don't think, though I have been known to talk about her parents, and indulge in humor far more vulgar than I share with her. I guess it's more a privacy instinct and a true concern about anonymity.
*Except that I have the worst memory in the world. I just googled and found a long guest post I have absolutely no memory of writing even when I re-read it. Who know what else I've said?
Had blogs existed when I was ten or twelve, and had I discovered a blog where parents or uncles were posting pseudonymously, I can't imagine I would have had the patience to read through much of it once it became clear that they weren't, in general, posting about me. If the older generation is doing it, it's obviously boring. Back to Chatroulette!
No idea what fat content I got. I did it because this brand of local grass-fed milk sells half gallons of cream with butter-making instructions on the side, so why not?*. I don't butter enough bread to justify it for myself, even if it were super-amazing (which it's not; very good, but not life-changing the way, say, homemade bread is).
*it's crazy easy, btw: just put it in the food processor until it turns into butter; strain and rinse
The smell of beets activates an intense this-is-fungal-and-will-kill-you response for me
I love this about beets and also about certain red Burgundies (which is to say, Pinot Noir generally has a vaguely beety aroma, but it's only in some Burgundies that I've found it to be a pronounced, slightly funky odor).
FWIW my 11 year old has never googled my given name, much less expressed interest in anything I wrote. Suit yourself, obvs, but I think only a vindictive ex or one of the residents here that could stand to be medicated would have any interest in the archives. Does the first page of google results disturb you?
I can't imagine I would have had the patience to read through much of it once it became clear that they weren't, in general, posting about me.
Yeah, there is that.
I may project my own tendency to read all the archives of everything on other people more than is realistic.
Cultured vs. uncultured makes a huge difference in taste.
This. Organic Valley (which I'm pretty sure is distributed in NYC?) makes a cultured butter that is very tasty and cheaper than the imports from Europe.
Does the first page of google results disturb you
No, but who knows where search technology will be in 5, 10, 25 years? I guess I should stop worrying. It's just that having an entirely unique pseud that is known by lots of IRL friends and family can be disconcerting.
In my googling, I ran across this delightful thread in which we all reported good news.
(My anticipated good news did not in fact come to pass, but I enjoyed the thread.)
sometimes you have to stack diacritics.
AAAAAH NEAT!
What does this look like? The recommended LaTeX package doesn't show anything obvious and my browser doesn't perfectly render a test page. That the latter surprises me amazes me.
It's the rinsing I hate in making butter; you're supposed to knead it under cold cold water and it took me long enough that my hands went numb. Numb and buttery, but if you want lovely skin you can work with fleece in the grease and stay warm. (But dirty.)
I spoke with a woman with celiac disease about a year and a half ago. Before she got diagnosed, she said, she was pretty convinced that her life was just going to suck forever. I guess it's good that they test for it more often.
I recommend slathering tapenade all over cheeseless pizzas -- don't bother with fake cheese; it's just not as good as good greasy, salty tapenade. The affected keyaki/kayak family members have now graduated to goat and sheep's milk products, however, which is all to the good. And yeah, almond milk is the best milk substitute by flavor, although soy milk has more protein. (If you like sweetness, the Trader Joe's house brand for almond milk, which I think is actually Silk; if you like bare-bones unsweetened stuff, there's some almond-coconut mix that is not bad.)
What about barley milk? Does anyone use that anymore?
Barley has gluten in it. They make gluten-free beer out of rice or sorghum or millet.
I have not read this thread yet, but the comments on beets made want to tell you all that I had beet fries the other day. They were delicious.
Guys, this tart is going to be great.
Great. BTW, how's that thing you're baking coming along?
I mentioned it at the other, more common place, but sometime last year my daughters and their little urchin girlfriends designated 'beet' as code for 'penis' (based apparently on some poorly understood French slang), and that's why we can't have beets at the dinner table anymore.
I'm baking the tart, JP. Duh.
I've also got a cake in the oven.
Actually, is "bake" used transitively in that sense?
217: I have found myself increasingly doing this, which, like, I dunno. Starting to feel awkwardly stalkerish. (Or mayhaps I always have and am now coming to terms with it.)