After college I moved to New York with my faux bro. He wanted to live in Chelsea (of course, don’t all gay New York men?) so I found us an apartment on 25th street. We lived in a two bedroom railroad apartment that required you to walk through the kitchen to get to the bathroom at the other end. This was a source of hilarity for pretty much every visitor but it was perfectly normal to New Yorkers.
My husband loves biscotti. Every time we see it on a menu the conversation is the same. “Ooh, biscotti!” And I reply by wrinkling my nose. For years, he has refused to accept that I simply do not want such a delicious treat. It’s absolutely impossible in his mind. And to be fair, I can understand his denial.
Heavy. Heavy is the word I hear the most to describe gluten-free baked goods. Well, heavy and chewy but I’ve already addressed chewy so we are left with the problem of heavy. Now one of the ways you make a cake lighter in traditional baking is to use cake flour. It has less gluten and it’s therefore lighter. Well something with less gluten seems like it would be easy to make gluten-free right? However, there is no gluten-free cake flour on the market. So I looked online for a recipe to make my own. Nothing. Huh?
My grandmother loves fruit with chocolate. You name it, chocolate covered strawberries, chocolate covered cherries, chocolate covered banana, basically if you cover any fruit in chocolate, she’s happy. Every Mother’s day, birthday, and Hanukkah I always go to my local chocolate shop and get her orangettes which I have learned are French for chocolate covered orange peel. And here I thought the famous blog Orangette was a made up word like Bakerella (which I am assuming is a pun on Barbarella). Who knew?
Red Velvet Cake seems to be a specialty of everyone’s grandmother who grew up in the South. However, being a Yankee, I only heard of it a few years ago. Now people seem to rave about it so I spent the last few years tasting red velvet cake at every southern restaurant we went to. It just seemed to be yellow cake mix with red food coloring. I was perplexed. I mean that can’t be what all the fuss was about. No way.
