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Creative cookery - at one remove.
Jan. 29th, 2007 02:18 pmIn a comment on the previous entry, The Tenor Mongoose ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
miss_next put me onto this post in her own LJ.
Very strange. Quite fascinating. And a new one on me.
These definitely aren't something I've invented, or indeed probably could invent; Diane's the cake-and-sweet-stuff baker around here, my culinary talents (such as they are) tend more towards the savoury - I must post my Pork with Chillies and Chocolate recipe sometime, if D hasn't already got it somewhere on the cuisine pages.
As if to prove the point of her cakey expertise, she's just suggested that those choco-caramel goodies sound like an adaptation of "Toffifay/Toffifee" sweets (I had to Google) which might be a source or inspiration for the dream version. Leaving out the hazelnut core, but with an extra wrapping of cake (brownie?) dough before baking in a muffin tin and topping with chocolate and coconut might result in a fair approximation of the dream-description. That "stalk" baffles me; my mum used to bake buns ("cupcakes", I suppose) whose domed tops were noticeably wider than the "body", as in the first picture on Wikipedia's "muffin" entry. A lot wider than a mushroom stalk, obviously, and therefore sturdy enough to hold the cake by, but still narrow enough to give a mushroomy shape.
Once again the Voice Downstairs makes a suggestion. Spielhuus is a toyshop in Basel which stocks, among other things, "toy" cooking utensils - except that "toy" doesn't do them justice. They're quarter-scale, but real - steel frying-pans with non-stick coating, steel enamelled and cast-iron ovenware etc. and as a result adults often buy them for personal "cute-miniature-cookery", because they'll work in a standard domestic kitchen. Some probably use the matching made-to-scale stoves; these run on charcoal(!) and are certainly not what I'd consider a safe toy (I can't accept that Swiss and German kids are that much more sensible than I'd have been.) The mere thought of giving one to a British or US child would make liablity lawyers salivate and give TV Watchdogs like Esther Rantzen and Lynn Wood a fit of hysterics.
Anyway, a Spielhuus muffin tin might be just the ticket for teeny, cute cakes "the size of table-tennis balls" as dreamt about, though it would take some experimentation to get the recipe right in the full-size version, then reduce it and recalculate the cooking time. Of course unless someone comes up with an on-line source, getting one of the muffin tins would involve a trip to Switzerland...
Which is a long way to go for just that.
miss_next put me onto this post in her own LJ. Very strange. Quite fascinating. And a new one on me.
These definitely aren't something I've invented, or indeed probably could invent; Diane's the cake-and-sweet-stuff baker around here, my culinary talents (such as they are) tend more towards the savoury - I must post my Pork with Chillies and Chocolate recipe sometime, if D hasn't already got it somewhere on the cuisine pages.
As if to prove the point of her cakey expertise, she's just suggested that those choco-caramel goodies sound like an adaptation of "Toffifay/Toffifee" sweets (I had to Google) which might be a source or inspiration for the dream version. Leaving out the hazelnut core, but with an extra wrapping of cake (brownie?) dough before baking in a muffin tin and topping with chocolate and coconut might result in a fair approximation of the dream-description. That "stalk" baffles me; my mum used to bake buns ("cupcakes", I suppose) whose domed tops were noticeably wider than the "body", as in the first picture on Wikipedia's "muffin" entry. A lot wider than a mushroom stalk, obviously, and therefore sturdy enough to hold the cake by, but still narrow enough to give a mushroomy shape.
Once again the Voice Downstairs makes a suggestion. Spielhuus is a toyshop in Basel which stocks, among other things, "toy" cooking utensils - except that "toy" doesn't do them justice. They're quarter-scale, but real - steel frying-pans with non-stick coating, steel enamelled and cast-iron ovenware etc. and as a result adults often buy them for personal "cute-miniature-cookery", because they'll work in a standard domestic kitchen. Some probably use the matching made-to-scale stoves; these run on charcoal(!) and are certainly not what I'd consider a safe toy (I can't accept that Swiss and German kids are that much more sensible than I'd have been.) The mere thought of giving one to a British or US child would make liablity lawyers salivate and give TV Watchdogs like Esther Rantzen and Lynn Wood a fit of hysterics.
Anyway, a Spielhuus muffin tin might be just the ticket for teeny, cute cakes "the size of table-tennis balls" as dreamt about, though it would take some experimentation to get the recipe right in the full-size version, then reduce it and recalculate the cooking time. Of course unless someone comes up with an on-line source, getting one of the muffin tins would involve a trip to Switzerland...
Which is a long way to go for just that.
