It was pouring here yesterday and seems it might continue today. We badly needed rain, but it does seem a bit gloomy for a Fourth of July weekend.
A friend of mine arrived for vacation here but went to Punta Cana in typical tourist fashion and I feel kind of bad for her that she came right when the skies finally decided to open up here.
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I cleaned and blanched some spinach a while back and froze it for making doughs. I decided to make some tortillas for wraps for tomorrow’s lunch. The cold spinach juice makes for a dough that doesn’t roll out as easily as regular tortillas, but I got the hang of it by my third one.
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My mom just did this for spinach chapatis.
I’ve never puréed the spinach entirely for a spiced version, and I cut back the liquid, but it does yield a tackier dough that takes a bit more flour.
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This one wasn’t sticky and felt pretty similar to the regular dough when mixed and kneaded, but it doesn’t stretch the same way in part because the spinach juice is cold while normally you use warm or sometimes even boiling water for plain tortillas.
Interesting. For chapatis it’s always cold (room temp) water.
I just made this same recipe: Kenji Lopez Although lime icebox cake though he calls it cracker pie.
Reading the reviews I did the same as you recommended, Shellybean.
I made a half recipe but used the full amount of lime juice and zest.
Other changes: replaced half the cream with yogurt. That helped further temper the cloying nature.
I used gingersnaps instead of Ritz crackers because that’s what I was trying to use up.
Came out quite well. Makes a change. Simple and easy and no bake without gelatin.
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Matcha tiramisu with store-bought ladyfingers to avoid the oven. A nicely bitter, not-too sweet dessert that I love.
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Currently working on a no-bake Russian honey cake. I cooked all the layers in a pan on the stovetop and will layer them as soon as I get the filling whipped once the AC does its work. 
I will then leave overnight for the magic to happen. Filling is kefir cream, dulce de leche, and heavy cream plus a little sugar.
It’s a good thing you get a lot of scraps when cutting the layers, because they’re very hard to stop eating! These are my favorite layers I’ve made simply because I salted the dough generously, where most honey cake recipes either don’t include salt or call for a measly pinch. I went with around 1% of the flour amount and the resulting cookie layers are irresistible!
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I rather distractedly grabbed the wrong mold to assemble this rather than my adjustable one to give this a little more room for unmolding, so getting this out in one piece was the goal today 
. Good thing this was just a small test cake. In any case, it’s absolutely delicious and I’d make it again with all the necessary adjustments (for example I would go with larger portions of the dough for the rounds). I didn’t end up adding any sugar as I thought it tasted plenty sweet without before I whipped it. Once whipped it tasted wonderful!
I do want to play around with a version of the layers that doesn’t get rolled out. There are about a million versions of Russian honey cake and some are made with a pourable batter that would work really well cooked stovetop.
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Today I attempted kimchi wang mandu with sauerkraut. I managed to make kimchi once here, but haven’t attempted since due to inability to procure ingredients and also fear. Making kimchi attracts a scary number of flies. Just pulling a container of it from the fridge immediately draws their attention. Sauerkraut is hard to come by here, but occasionally makes an appearance. And I thought, why not give it the kimchi treatment with some garlic, fish sauce, and some chilies I toasted and ground? I made delicious bacon and spam kimchi fried rice using sauerkraut, and then I craved the wang mandu like the ones I would buy in Flushing.
I made a filling with mung bean noodles to sub for sweet potato noodles and used more meat in place of the usual tofu that goes into these. Added garlic chives, garlic cloves, some minced shallots, and seasoned with fish sauce, soy sauce, salt, sugar, and some sesame oil. Chili flakes to taste. Flies LOVE garlic chives, cabbage, and anything fermented, so I worked quickly to attract as few of them as possible.
As for the dough I thought, why not make them sourdough, too?
The takeaway is that unlike with commercial yeast, two rounds of fermentation are needed. While some commercial yeast-raised steamed buns have a bulk ferment and final proofing, many proceed directly to shaping and proofing after making the dough. And others do a bulk ferment and shape then steam immediately or just a few minutes after shaping. But with sourdough you’ve got dough that will likely take around four hours to rise. I didn’t want moist meat and vegetable filling sitting in 80-something degree weather for that long. So a bulk fermentation was needed. Shaped them, and tested some immediately after shaping. Nope, doughy. They need proofing. A couple of hours of proofing and you get soft, fluffy, pillowy buns. Absolutely delicious!
I actually tested two different doughs and the dough with lower hydration is definitely the better one. You want 50-55% hydration in baozi if you want the pleats to be visible and pretty. Both were a bit more wet than ideal, so I’ll be working to make sure I stay below 55% in any future attempts.
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Single serve blueberry slump/grunt. I have always loved this homey dessert and it’s even better when you don’t want to turn the oven on. Like cobbler, I like having it with cold cream poured over.
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Not baked? Did you cook it stovetop and steam the dough topping?
Yes, slumps/grunts are made on stovetop. It’s just like making chicken and dumplings.
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Oh I thought they were baked like cobblers and buckles. You learn something every day!
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Walnut Buttermilk Fudge. Always great to use a whole cup of buttermilk up. My mum buys it in 2L cartons because she drinks it, makes salad dressing and bakes with it, but she can’t always keep up. This is rich and sweet, as fudge is, but with a tangy note. https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/pecan-buttermilk-fudge
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I made the Serious Eats potato donuts and they are great, with the caveat that I upped the salt to 2%. I don’t see any reason to use less than 2% for a donut, and to top it off you will add a significant amount of flour when patting the dough out, so having 2% salt really helps to offset that. They are so delicious. The potato gives them a nice toothsome texture while remaining pillowy soft.
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Those look so good! 
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I make frozen Chocolate Peanut Butter Roll candy for my girlfriend to “snack” on. She really loves this candy. The photo is of an end piece as they look better than the middle pieces, but all taste the same.
It is a “trial and error” recipe that I have played with over the years.
Chocolate Peanut Butter Roll Candy
1/2 stick room temperature (good quality) soft butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons of milk (whole milk preferred)
4 tablespoons of Hershey’s unsweetened Cocoa powder
2 cups of 10X powdered sugar (have more available)
3/4 jar of peanut butter (smooth) 16 ounce jar
Mix 10X powdered sugar in a bowl with cocoa powder. Add butter, vanilla extract & milk and knead the mixture with your hands. Have a helper add 1/4 cup of powdered sugar until the mixture is not sticky and will roll out (kind of like bread dough). If you add too much 10X powdered sugar and dough becomes dry just add a tablespoon of soft butter and knead it in.
Using 10X powdered sugar dust two pieces of parchment paper (or wax paper), take 1/3 of the mixture and roll it out between the parchment paper. Try to get it to a thickness of 3/16" to 1/4", remove top parchment paper. Taking a butter knife, cut the blob you just rolled out into a rectangle shape. (Save the scraps for re-use) Spread peanut butter on top of rectangle – about 3/16" to 1/4" same as mixture thickness. Starting at one end, use your thumbs to begin to make the roll. Roll it up into a log and place on a heavy plate. Repeat making up logs until you have used up all of your mixture. Place the plate (with the logs on it) in the freezer for 1 hour. Remove from freezer and cut into 3/4” slices and put in a freezer bag. Place freezer bag with pieces back into freezer and enjoy one or two pieces at a time.
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A got a huge pomelo from some friends yesterday and I decided to try a posset showdown.
One was this recipe:
And the other was this one:
I did much smaller quanties, obviously. I used vitamin C to boost the acidity of the pomelo.
The top one has less citrus juice, but is noticeably tarter.
The Guardian one is sweeter, but not in a bad way. It’s still perfectly acceptable sweetness for me. I’m honestly unsure of which I like more. They taste decidedly different, but are both delicious. Felicity’s method is a bit more complicated than it needs to be, though. Pretty much everyone goes for simmering the cream and sugar, and Cook’s Illustrated tested why this is preferable for the consistency. In fact next I want to try out Cook’s Illustrated, which is nearly identical in terms of ratios to the Felicity one. I think I would just go with their method.
Then of course the other thing I want to try is their method with the YouTube recipe I made. 
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