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Friday, July 16, 2010

Happy Accidents


Butter is one of those things that is so easy to make and so much better homemade. Even better, you can add stuff to it (garlic butter, anyone?). And if you're trying to make caramel whipped cream but for some reason it surpasses the whipped cream stage and moves right on into butter - like what happened to my boyfriend's dad and sister - it's alright because it turns out that caramel butter is awesome. It's not too sweet or flavorful, so you can use it on savory foods as well as sweet ones. Like a grilled cheese, for instance. The butter's just sweet enough to bring out the savory flavors without being gross. At the same time, though, it's sweet enough to put on toast with jam. Or pancakes. Man, I'm hungry...

Anyway, I had some cream that I wanted to use up because it was going to go bad one day if I didn't, so I threw it in my food processor and started whirring. Somewhere just before the whipped cream stage, I realized I had some caramel and I decided to throw that in for a happy-accident-reenactment of sorts. And lucky for you guys (is anyone even out there?) I thought to take pictures throughout the process, so here is a recipe with step-by-step photos:

Caramel Butter

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
about 3-4 tablespoons caramel



Put all of your ingredients in a food processor, blender, or bowl with a mixer. Keep in mind that the cream becomes foamy and expands as it is churned, so you need to leave extra room in your processor/blender/bowl. This is the whipped cream stage:

Churn the cream until the buttermilk separates from the fat (past the whipped cream phase). Once the buttermilk has separated, pour all of the contents into a strainer set over a bowl. Using a spoon, gently squeeze the buttermilk out of the butter and reserve it in the bowl.


The separated butter and its buttermilk:

Transfer the butter to a piece of waxed paper and roll it up to form a log (you can also pack it into a small container if you prefer).


The buttermilk can be saved and used in other tasty recipes, like pancakes or buttermilk cake. Or you can drink it straight, that's pretty good too.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Is This Thing Still On?

So, it turns out that if you get a blog started, stick it in a dark corner of the interwebs and forget about it for a little while, it will sprout this odd mushroom-shaped, doughy substance that looks like this:

No, wait... sorry, my mistake. That's no world wide fungi, it's just a popover. I haven't had much spare time for baking adventures (what with work and summer school), but when my mom went on a wild rampage - tearing up most of the southwestern end of Austin - looking for a popover pan, I felt pretty obligated to reconnect with the oven once she'd finally found one. I searched the non-moldy parts of the internet for a recipe and found one called "Best Popovers Ever" which sounded promising, and I am happy to report that it fulfilled.

Best Popovers Ever
From Martha Stewart's Twitter Feed (edited to not sound like it came from a twitter feed)

4 cups flour
1 tbsp + 1 tsp salt
4 cups milk
8 eggs
10 oz grated gruyere
cooking spray

Place a 12 cup popover pan in the oven and heat to 350F.
Sift 4 cups flour with 1T+2t salt.
Heat 4 cups of milk.
Whisk 8 eggs slowly and add the milk & flour.
Spray the hot popover pan with cooking spray and fill just over 3/4 of the way with batter. Top with 5-10oz grated gruyere (depending on your preference) and bake 50 minutes. Invert to remove.


I halved this recipe because nobody (myself included) wanted to wait 2 hours for dinner and we only had a 6 cup popover pan, but 6 turned out to be more than enough! Also, I used about 2-3 oz of gruyere which turned out to be a pretty good amount, but if you want it cheesy then use the full amount.


If that isn't incentive enough to go make some popovers, they're yeast-free! and so easy and delicious! Also, word on the street is that you can make these in a muffin tin... but you didn't hear that from me.