How To Make Cocanes

You never know what you're going to find when you look through really old cookbooks. This time the recipe is pretty normal ... but the name. Are you kidding me? Did they not know what that sounded like? If you don't believe me, here's a picture of the original recipe in the Ohio State Grange cookbook. Name aside, how are they? I like them, but you should understand that I don't like things as sweet as most people seem to. That's why I rarely eat candy or pastries. When someone brings … [Read more...]

How To Make Pineapple Drop Cookies

If you've been following since August of 2008*, you might remember me saying that the bruschetta pizza disappeared before I was able to get any. These pineapple cookies must have been even better, because I never even got the photo of them after coming out of the oven before they got snarfed up. UPDATE: Obviously that's the right picture now. So if this looks familiar, yes you saw it last week. They looked just about like snickerdoodles, and tasted sort of like a sugar cookie, but with a … [Read more...]

How To Make Carolina-style Pulled Pork — Take 1

The first time I had Carolina-style BBQ was at the Cleveland Rib Cook-off several years ago. I knew the sauce didn't look like any of the others, so I gave it a try. It was amazing. I've been looking for something similar ever since, but have only found a few examples, and they were like most commercial sauces: corn syrup and spices. So I finally decided to give it a try myself. … [Read more...]

How To Make Custard Cream for Cream Puffs

We wanted to do cream puffs, and I kept finding recipes that said to fill them with vanilla pudding from a box. Yeah, I'd rather just buy them ready-made if I can't do any better than that. So I went looking for a scratch recipe. Not only did it come out as a great filling, it's the best vanilla pudding I've ever had. I'll be making this again soon, minus the cream puffs. … [Read more...]

How To Make Cream Puffs

Cream puffs. Chocolate éclairs. Pâte à choux ... well, not quite. This is a quick little puff pastry recipe that you can throw together quicker than you can defrost the frozen ones from Costco. It's less sweet than the version at Jenni's link, so (in my opinion) it's more of a blank slate for what you want to fill them or top them with. Her recipe is the more traditional one. … [Read more...]