first-try shortbread

Not following recipes when baking is just plain stupid. I'm sure that none of you are surprised to hear that I do this all the time. Or that I gather up three or four recipes and pick and choose what I like from each.

Which is how I ended up with not-very-good lemon shortbread last week. An email has since been sent to my mother, begging for a copy of the family shortbread recipe from Christmases past, and then I will try again. This could take months. The recipe may even be lost. :(

I should have known I was headed for trouble. Things didn't turn out bad, per se, but it also wan't great. I have a decent idea of what I didn't like though: the flour to butter/sugar ratio. Too much flour, not enough butter. It was too dry, too crumbly. I tasted the flour, strongly. Things weren't mixed the way they should have been, and really, I just screwed up based on laziness. Apparently, I also should have gone with icing sugar, and far FAR less than I expected.

I was going to put the actual recipe up. There's no good reason to clog the internet up with a crappy recipe, though. That seems pretty pointless.

Anyone have a great shortbread recipe they can direct me towards?

ack? disaster?

I kinda went crazy in the kitchen today. Bread machine bread. Chocolate mousse (delightful). Broccoli cheddar soup.

The sad thing is the soup did not make me happy, and it is kind of overshadowing the rest. It's grainy, rather than smooth and creamy, and I am finding the broccoli taste very weak.

My thought is that it's one of a few things:

• the soup was made from frozen broccoli stalks + 1 full head, maybe not the best idea
• no blender, and I've never been happy with how a processor handles soups
• not enough broccoli

We'll have another go later, I'm sure. Although for me to get a chance to make this soup is unusual: it's actually a Bunny specialty, and it's usually off limits to me (since he has relatively fewer specialties).

butternut spice

I had hoped, today, that I'd be posting a recipe for a sweet and spicy butternut squash soup I made last night. But, uhhhh .... I kinda busted it. I put too much cayenne pepper in, and then I tried to compensate with the sweet side. What we ended up with was something too spicy for me and too sweet for Bunny.

We'll try again in a couple of weeks, see how it comes. In theory, this soup is all that. Butternut squash has some sweet going on all on its own, so I figured we'd carmelize the onions to get more sweet, and give it a heavy kick of cayenne to balance that out and interest Bunny.

So, no soup recipe for you. However, I will leave you with a suggestion: roast your squash before turning it into soup. Roasting it will develop the flavours a little more than cooking it all the way through in the soup, and you'll get some of that lovely carmelization going on. Trust me, it's delicious.

meringues

They will be the death of me. I am determined to get them right but just can't quite seem to get the inside to be that perfect marshmallow like fluff.

I think I'm going about them the wrong way at the moment. I've been using a cinnamon meringue recipe, which requires folding of cinnamon and cocoa into the egg whites once whipped. This is doubly troublesome as Bunny and I do not own a rubber spatula (how? why? it's ludicrous, but I'm loathe to spend money right now), and so I have been folding with a spoon. Perhaps I need to start with a more straightforward meringue than something which requires folding.

I also might be well advised to use a recipe from an author I trust than the random (and 3/4's terrible) 1001 Cookies book my aunt gave me the other year for Christmas. That will be the next try, I believe. Give me a few more weeks and Bunny is going to be sick to death of meringues.

On another note, this afternoon is going to be a little hectic: I have a meeting, and Bunny and I have to go grocery shopping. I also (rather stupidly) put off a phone call that I really should have made today, but now will have to do tomorrow. Oh well, not much to be done about that.

macaroni fail

I don't generally use recipes in my cooking.

Oh, I bake with recipes, and I'm known to use a recipe as a starting point with cooking (in fact, I love using recipes as starting points .... I just don't actually follow them), or for inspiration. But I'm not the most recipe friendly.

Most of my go to meals are rather more a collection of flavours and starting points. For example, quiche is made with a well paired cheese and other filling, layered in a pie shell till full. Beat some eggs with some milk or cream (depending on how fattening you feel like being) and pour over, until you think you haven't got quite enough. That's essentially how I make quiche - with a general outline but no real recipe.

Sometimes, this does not work out as intended. As evidenced by the sham of mac and cheese I made tonight. It wasn't bad, by any means. It was better than KD, or what I've been served at some pretty terrible diners.

What it wasn't, though, was my mac and cheese. It wasn't creamy and decadent, feeling like a gooey, chewy yumminess in my mouth. I messed up a few places. First, I don't actually use macaroni in my mac and cheese - I use miniature shells; this time, though I was out, and so macaroni it was. Usually, I also make a 1.5 quart container of our favourite oozy goodness. But today, I made a 2 quart container. Usually, I use fresh grated cheddar. Today, I had a bag of pre-grated cheddar in the freezer and I was lazy.

At the end of the day, what came out of the oven was not ooey gooey delicious. It was more ... barely coated noodles. Not super dry, but barely cheesey.

A solid C. Not so happy.

Now? I'm going to think about turning the zucchini in my fridge into muffins, and then go snuggle with my Bunny.