So my super-smart baker-almost-psychologist sister (aka Vegan Ukelele on YouTube ) has decided to branch out into super-smart musical baking videos.  Since she's vegan, almost everything will work for kosher kitchens as well. Did I mention she went to baking school and everything?  If she tells you something's good, it is . And her first video is all about one of my favourites: cornbread.  Or cornbread muffins.  It’s all in how you bake them up, as I’ll let her explain in the video, which I’m embedding below. Watching this video, so proud of my “sister-from-the-same-mother,” I had quite a few weird separated at birth moments, thinking in my head, "That's exactly what I would have said."  That was especially true because I was watching with NR, who has

One of the basic baking ingredients that’s particularly tough to come by in Israel is corn syrup.  And some Fridays, it seems like every single recipe I want to try – whether it’s pecan pie (or the pecan bars I made today!), peanut brittle , or something else – relies on a generous quantity of the stuff.  Corn syrup in a recipe isn’t just for flavour, so as most people have found, you usually can’t just substitute something else, like honey, maple syrup, or straight sugar.  Corn syrup does some kind of magic that I can’t explain and helps things thicken up and set, especially in candy making.  (If you know, feel free to explain it to me in the comments!) But there is one thing you can substitute:  INVERT SUGAR. Invert sugar is a sugar-water syrup that’s been boiled to 236°F (114°C) and then cooled off slightly.  At that temperature, the sugar turns… well, magical.  Again, explain it to me in the comments.  But essentially – it turns into cor...

Tip o’ the Day: (recipe follows) Always preheat your oven to 25-50°F higher than the recipe calls for, then turn it down. You’ll lose 25-30 degrees of heat when you open it and patchke around getting the pan in and out. And most breads (and many pastries) do well with a strong burst of initial heat anyway. Wanted to get a picture of this before it was too late, but… well, it was almost too late.  That’s how good this was with our chili tonight! This really is one of the few recipes I’d say would be completely different without a cast-iron skillet. I have made cornbread in pans and it’s lovely… but there is something awesomely crispy about cornbread baked in butter on preheated cast-iron.  Given that my soul-food diet precludes bacon, I tell myself that this deep, hearty crunch and this corny cornbread’s crunchy sweet / savoury crust is the next best thing.  Or really quite special in its own right, depending on if you’re a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty kind of ...

(because we just had amazing garlic bread at my mother’s house last night!) … then have bread on TOP of your regular supper!!! In this case, chili, with cornbread on top.  Always a hit, but this could easily be made with this quick n’ easy beer bread instead.  The chili around here is usually pareve, so I used milk in the cornbread; if the chili had meat, you could just use water – if I’m using tinned corn, I’ll save the corn water and use that – or some pareve kind of milk, but I don’t adore pareve milks in baking. Use any chili you want:  homemade, storebought, whatever – just make sure it’s very moist, or you’ll be gasping for liquids as you eat it, because the cornbread sucks up some of the liquid, while baking evaporates some.  Lose-lose, so start with a very wet chili. The cornbread on top is adapted from the Joy of Cooking, and I usually double it, because we love it like crazy and one batch just isn’t enough: Ingredients 3/4 cup cornmeal 1 ta...

Once again, I am happy and amazed that bread – even the BEST breads – can be made not only pareve, but also completely vegan.  That’s because I have declared “Vegan Vursdays” and tonight, we are hoping to have bread with soup – a classic combination that’s perfect for a day like today. I found this recipe for Sourdough Corn Bread that looked good (though I might not go so far as to shape it into bread bowls), except it calls for starter at 100% hydration.  The starter that I’ve been building up all week is more of a stiff starter (I estimated 50, but that’s probably not right, either). At The Fresh Loaf, I found this primer explaining the math of how to convert recipes to use a stiffer or thinner starter, but it started giving me a headache. So – always my father’s child! - I broke it down using a spreadsheet.  You just plug in: quantity of starter called for, at what hydration flour and water quantities from the recipe how much starter you HAVE, at w...