The Pleasure of Measures

I'm one of those cooks who uses a pinch of this and a dash of that, and I tend to measure by eye. In cooking, that's not a bad thing. But cooking is more forgiving than baking, which depends on a precise combination of elements in a certain proportion to produce a pastry.

Remember those "For Dummies" books? They've got a website!

"Baking is a science, and when you mix together ingredients, you're creating chemistry, albeit edible chemistry, so being precise is important. There is balance between flour, leaveners, fats, and liquids."

Click here for a crash course in measuring various ingredients, from flour to shortening.

At our Chocolate-y Party this week, I helped kids create their own hot cocoa mix from scratch. They each filled out a recipe card, then followed the recipe themselves by measuring ingredients into a heart-shaped bag. Then they took home the bag and the card, so they could enjoy their hot chocolate with their families! This activity was loads of fun, and whether the kids were old hats at cooking or they'd never followed a recipe before, they really got into it!

Kyle, pictured above, is leveling out his tablespoon of cocoa powder by shaking off the excess! These kids were precise!

More Digital Food

Another great web source for recipes are the websites of grocery markets and specialty stores. The frosted brownies above are Moist and Decadent Dark Chocolate Brownies from a recipe at the Whole Foods website. The ingredients look very simple, but in the comments, people who've made them rave, "They were gone in a day! Had to make a second batch, best brownies I or my husband have ever had."

Here are some more store sites with recipe sections:
Cub Foods

Trader Joe's

Piggly Wiggly

Sentry Foods

Willy Street Co-op

Copps

Brennan's Market (more of a blog than a recipe site)

Know of any others? Post them here in the comment section!

A Digital Cookbook?

While I don't think that online recipe sites will replace printed, bound cookbooks anytime soon, these Internet jewels are worth looking into if you haven't before. As with anything else online, approach internet recipe sites using discrimination and common-sense. Many recipes are user-submitted, and could possibly flop.

Online Recipe Cons
• Recipe could be untested
• Directions not professionally written; could be missing steps
• Annoying pop-ups
• You have to wade through advertising

Online Recipe Site Pros
• Searchable
• User reviews
• Scaleable
• Interactive

What online recipe sites offer that cookbooks cannot is the interactive quality of being able to submit, rate, search and comment on recipes. On a very active cooking site, members will chime in and talk about how the recipe turned out for them, what they substituted, and what they'd do differently if they made the dish again. It can be fascinating to read the string of comments attached to a particularly popular recipe.

Online recipes are infinitely more searchable than a physical cookbook. Not only can you search for recipes that have specific combinations of ingredients, but you can also specify things like a cooking method (baked, grilled, etc.) or other terms like "easy" or "low-fat." And if you don't have something specific to search, you can browse.

It's also easy to scale the recipe size, for either more or fewer portions, without doing any math! Let's say you have an oddball amount of a certain ingredient you're looking to get rid of. (Not that that's ever happened to me, mind you, because I'm such a precise planner...ha ha!) You can tinker with scaling the recipe up or down until it fits the amount of the ingredient you have on hand.

My personal favorite recipe site is allrecipes.com. They have an active membership who post very useful comments and critiques, and they have an online recipe box where you can sign up for a free membership and store your favorite recipes.

Click here for a fabulous chocolate article at allrecipes.com - 10 Best Chocolate Recipes!

Ganache with Panache

That rich, smooth, glossy coating that makes cakes and candies (nearly) too pretty to eat? That's ganache! Is it a frosting, or is it a candy? It's both! Ganache is two treats in one.

According to Wikipedia, the first ganache was a result of a happy accident, when an apprentice spilled cream on some chocolate he was chopping. Ganache means "fool" -- the epithet that the master chocolatier exclaimed!

For such a versatile compound, Ganache is made with relatively simple ingredients: hot cream and chocolate. The character of the ganache will depend on the type of chocolate used, the proportion of chocolate to cream, and how much the mixture is beaten.

Check out the Joy of Baking for an in-depth article that describes frosting a cake with ganache, as well as whipping the confection into truffle filling.

The Candy Man Can

Homemade candy. You can always tell the difference, can't you? Candymaking involves many skills. Tempering chocolate. Watching the thermometer like a hawk. Keeping your family members from licking things until you're done. But the results are always worth it. And unless you bungle the job really badly, someone's always willing to eat your mistakes!

The Land O' Lakes website has over ninety candy recipes posted. Look at this amaretto truffle bar. Don't you want it? Right now? (Seriously, someone make this.) If you're thinking about entering the candy category this year, cruise on over to Land O' Lakes for some inspiration. (And if you happen to make a batch of mistakes, I know a group of people on Perimeter Road who would gladly take them off your hands.)

It's All in the Details

Talk about a well-accessorized cake! This beauty comes from the King Arthur Flour website, where you, too, can obtain the fixings to give your cake pizazz.

This heart-shaped cake was baked in a disposable paper pan. No flipping the cake out of the pan only to have it tear in half; no hunting down your pan when you've left it at your friend's house after a party. And look at those pearls. They're edible. And you can get them at the King Arthur Flour site, too!