Confections 1 - Golden Eggs

Recently I read an advance reader copy of Confections of a Closet Master Baker by Gesine Bullock-Prado. I mentioned that it was one of the few books that include recipes that I've ever read where I literally wanted to make every one of them. Feeling like I needed to do some baking recently, I decided to do just that. This is the first.



Golden Eggs are a very rich yellow cake batter, baked in egg molds (or in my case, muffin pans) then dredged in butter and cinnamon/sugar. I'm not going to type out the recipes here, you'll need to get her book eventually for that.

Here's a batch ready to go in:



I did one batch in a silicone muffin pan, the other in metal. Had much better luck getting the silicone batch to release. FWIW.

The recipe said this made about 12 "eggs." I think I could have got 30+ out of it, and these are pretty big muffins. Also - possibly because of their size, I had them in the oven for almost 10 minutes past the 15 called for.

After dredging:



Had to let them cool a bit before dredging - and be really careful not to drop them in the melted butter!

Ready for the close-up?



Mmmm... decadent.

Fool

Fool: A Novel by Christopher Moore


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It took me forever to maintain enough interest to get through Christopher Moore's latest here. I'm just not an appreciator of Shakespeare, and this whole thing was a comedic Shakespeare riff. I could see Moore's humor shining through, but the whole time I know I was missing bits because I didn't know the back story, and that diminished my enjoyment of it. I know - it's my own fault...

View all my reviews >>

Au Revoir To All That

Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France by Michael Steinberger


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
With erudite yet readable prose, Michael Steinberger chronicles the demise of the food culture of France. Bureaucracy, fast food, outside influences all come to bear on the issue. He doesn't offer a solution, but reveals a glimmer of hope in a young generation of chefs who are embracing the values of their forbears while looking to the future...

View all my reviews >>

The Bookshelf

I'd been meaning to clean up our bookshelf for awhile, and a conversation at a dinner party a couple weeks ago provided the motivation to get started on it.

These are shelves that Mich built in to the room, providing us specific places for books, CDs and ohter stuff. I think she did an awesome job, but the mess of stuff on the shelves wasn't showcasing them well.

It had been organized generally by author, with an oversized collection and a couple other types of books split out. I decided to pull the fiction separate from the non-fiction, and make displays of my three main collections - Bond books, Tolkien, and Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Here's an overview of the new shelf. Click through (from the link, not the photo) to Flickr and hover for notes:



The Bond collection:



The Tolkien collection:



And the Pratchett collection:



My collection of weird books:



And up on top of the shelf, our collection of trivia games:



(Sigh.) I love having books in order...

The Magicians

The Magicians: A Novel by Lev Grossman


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A boy learns that magic is real, heads of to wizard university, and eventually makes his way to a mythical land to have adventures. Sound familiar? Lew Grossman finds a way to make it feel fresh and realistic, while creating an homage to Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling and others.


View all my reviews >>

Birthday party

Julien's 8th birthday is today, and we celebrated yesterday with a nice little pool party. Just a few pictures -

A whole mess o'kids in the pool:



Blowing out candles:



The sliced Neapolitan birthday cake:



And some wild-eyed present-opening fun:



Happy Birthday Julien!

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
It had been a while since I'd read the Hitchhiker's Guide, but I had a couple of hours to kill at the DMV and found a copy in my glove box. It was all I remember.



I'm at a loss to explain Douglas Adams's particular genius, so I'm going to simply quote from near the end of this book, a passage that sets up the second book in the trilogy, The Restaurant at the end of the Universe:



"The history of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.



For instance, the first phase is characterized by the phrase 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat' and the third by the question 'Where should we have lunch?'"



Genius.






View all my reviews >>