Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheel Cookies


Merry 151 days until Christmas, that's right only 4 months and 30 days left to finish your Christmas shopping. So why am I making Christmas cookies in July? Well that's what my random recipe generator told me to do and I figure I will have a leg up come the holiday season. This cookie looks impressive and will sure get you some nods at the various Christmas events we all attend. Though this recipe is not super difficult I would say if you have not made sugar cookies before this is not the one to start with.

The recipe starts off with a typical sugar cookie dough which is then divided in half to become the chocolate portion and the peppermint portion. The chocolate half gets melted chocolate and vanilla, while the peppermint half gets peppermint extract and candy canes. Since it is July candy canes are in short supply, although I did find a couple kicking around the house. For the rest mint candies have to play the part. Once the doughs have been mixed up and allowed time to rest comes the challenge, rolling the doughs together. The peppermint dough is placed on top of the chocolate and the fun begins. In the episode of Good Eats Alton Brown uses a flexible cutting board to assist in rolling. I don't have one such cutting board so I just went for broke and starting rolling. This produced a lot of cracks in the dough and bits falling off, it was not a pretty sight. I did manage to complete the roll and stick on all the pieces that had fallen off. To my surprise when I cut the cookies the insides looked a lot better than the outsides and I ended up with something similar to the pictures in the book. Some practice I'm sure would help, good thing it is only July. As for the taste it is a solid sugar cookies that will fill you with Christmas cheer.

Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheel Cookie Recipe

Angel Food Cake

Angel Food Cake Secret Weapon

I was all set to make this cake last week. I had glanced at the recipe earlier in the week and thought I had everything I needed. We had 9 eggs in the fridge which I thought would be plenty, the recipe called for 12, hence this entry is a little later than usual. It is really only the egg whites that are needed so instead of separating a whole carton of eggs I turned to the angel food cake secret weapon (not actually that secret) a carton of egg whites. One carton contains 16 egg whites, enough to make the cake and a nice omelette to go with it. If for some reason you really want to separate the eggs yourself, the leftover yolks can be frozen in an ice cube tray for later use.

Angel food cake is based on an egg white foam created by thousands of bubbles. In order to make bubbles in a liquid there needs to be something to break the surface tension of the liquid. Take water for instance, it will not create stable bubbles on its own, this is because the water molecules are too attracted to each other. Add soap and the surface tension is reduced allowing bubbles to form. Bubbles are round because a sphere has the least surface area of any shape and thus is the easiest to form. Egg whites contain a good deal of protein and when broken up, by physical agitation, they allow bubbles to form. These bubbles gives angel food cake its lightness and its lift, as there are no chemical or biological leaveners (baking powder, baking soda, yeast) in the recipe.

Egg White Foam

One of the famous qualities of this cake is that it is fat free, no butter, no oil, no nothing and I can't say that the fat is greatly missed. Its even pretty low in calories, approximately 173 calories for 1/12 of the cake (that's according to http://caloriecount.about.com/cc/recipe_analysis.php, pretty cool site). The cake is pretty sweet and almost reminds me of a marshmallow in flavour. The cake on its own is pretty good but it really shines when paired with something else like jam. Toppings are great but they can quickly send the low-calorie and fat free status out the window.

A few notes on pans: this cake is supposed to be baked in a tube pan, this was not a problem. The problem occurred when the recipe said to turn the tube pan upside down to let it cool. This was supposed to stop the cake from falling and loosing its lightness. After about a minute upside down the cake fell right out of the pan therefore I am not sure if the upside down part is a good idea. Secondly, in order for the cake to "climb" the walls of the pan during cooking the pan should not be greased. As you can imagine the outside layer of the cake sticks to the pan, leaving a nice mess. I shouldn't complain too much, a soak in some hot water removed the stuck on cake without too much effort.

Final thoughts: when I go for dessert I want something really rich and dense, so angel food cake is not my favourite dessert in the world. It is a viable option for those with a sweet tooth looking to watch their waste lines, but beware of excess toppings!

Recipe: Angel Food Cake

Braised Oxtail 


Here we are again in the "variety meats" section in the Joy of Cooking. Variety meats are all the good stuff: tongue, heart, liver etc. There is so much unexplored territory here it is hard to choose and sometimes find theses interesting meats. This time I went with possibly the most accessible of the variety meats: ox tail. It is pretty much what it sounds like except it is not really from an ox (an ox being a bull that has been castrated) just a regular cow. Ox tail is a very boney piece of meat which is the reason it is so good for slow cooking. The pictures of the bones are at the bottom so if you don't want to see them you don't have to scroll down all the way. There are some important food science concepts dependent on them so I figured they were worth including. I have mentioned this before but I think it is worth saying again, the more a muscle is worked the tougher and more flavourful it gets. So just think of how much a cow moves its tail, therefore ox tail is really tough. Locked away behind all the toughness and connective tissue is lots of big beefy flavour and the only way to unlock it is with slow cooking. There are several types of slow cooking but braising works well for this application since the meat is submerged in liquid it keeps it from drying out. I guess I should define braising and distinguish it from stewing. Braising is usually done to a whole piece of meat submerged in a flavourful liquid, while stewing is small uniformly cut pieces of meat cooked in a flavourful liquid.

I often find that slow cooked meats lack the big flavour I am after. They may be tender but take them out of their sauce and the meat itself is rather bland; this is where ox tail is different. Since some of the pieces are about 50% bone there is a lot of flavour. The flavour comes from the marrow of the bone, the same concept as boiling bones to make a stock. This not only flavours the stock the meat is cooking in but also adds something to the meat itself. Moreover, ox tail contains a good deal of collagen (the protein that makes up connective tissue) which when cooked breaks down into gelatine. The gelatine helps to thicken the liquid and gives the stew incredible body. Body is a hard thing to describe if you don't know what I mean. The best way to describe it is a smooth but substantial mouthfeel.

The recipe itself is very simple if you have a lot of time on your hands for the slow cooking. The meat is browned, submerged in beef stock and put in the oven for 4 hours. Then vegetables are added and the mixture is cooked for another hour. After 5 hours the meat should pull right off the bone. The stock is strained and used to make a gravy and there you have it. Two small notes, this is very rich so the addition of a little bit of acid would be nice and there is a good deal of fat in the stock, take time to skim as much as possible off. Skipping this step will leave your stew somewhat greasy. These points are very minor, I loved this recipe. I had a little trouble finding ox tail. I had seen it at the grocery store before but it is not something that is in stock all the time. I had no luck in to chain grocery stores and had to go to an actual butcher shop.

The moment I know you have all been waiting for: the bones. A cow's tail is tapered from the base of the spine to the end of the and thus ox tail pieces come in different sizes. The three bones below are a sampling of some of the sizes. The two larger pieces are from the base of the spine area and are shaped as you would expect a vertebrae to be. Notice on the ends of the bones there is a little cap. This a spinal disk, the piece of cartilage that separates vertebras. If you have ever slipped a disk that piece is out of whack. As you might have guessed the smallest bone is from closer to the end of the tail. Hopefully you have learned something and are not grossed out. I will say I am no bovine biologist, I did do some research but if you are a bovine biologist please comment on how I did and even if you are not please comment anyways.

Raw Ox Tail