If you’re like me and cook by intuition, it can be hard to know when a kugel is just right to go into the oven.  How do you know you’ve added enough salt and other seasonings?  You don’t want to accidentally go overboard, but how much is enough?  And you certainly don’t want to invest all that effort and bake the thing for an hour or whatever only to discover that it tastes bland as paste. Of course, you could just take a taste of the raw mixture, but somehow, that option has never seemed appealing to me. So what can you do? This isn’t a fancy tip, but it’s one has helped me so much over the years.  I think it will come in handy for you in all sorts of ways – not just with kugels, but also with gefilte fish, cakes, cookies, breads; anything you don’t want to sample raw for whatever reason. (Lots of real bakers eat raw bread dough, even sourdough, and claim to love it… I am not one of them, and the thought of eating raw flour products seems just icky to me....

Thursday night truly begins only when I do my challah calculations and print out the week’s customized spreadsheet.  I have spreadsheets like this set up for about 6 challah recipes and a few other breads (a sourdough cornbread, the chocolate sourdough I use for sufganiyot and a few more recipes that need scaling up or down at various times. Every week, it’s a new printout.  I feel bad wasting the paper, but I feel like I have a clean new formula to work with.  What I should do is just keep a copy of the recipe, scaled for x2, x3, x4 etc (x3 makes 5 challahs, plus a bit; that’s what I’m making this week).  I have one hanging around from Rosh Hashanah that has something like x9 on it, and that was half what I ended up making, I think. Anyway, I do waste the paper, and it may not be normal, but it feels good to start fresh each week… so there. This is the basic “reliable challah” (eggless) that I make when somebody orders challah (I occasionally and VERY info...

I bragged here over the summer about Elisheva’s challah-baking efforts while away from home.   Well, over the last few years, it seems like she’s become the official birthday-cake baker for her circle of friends.  Usually, she does something simple, but last night, inspiration struck and she made this Hobbit-themed cake, presumably from a friend who is kind of into The Hobbit. She baked the half-round cake (this one was a cake mix, but usually she does them from scratch) in a metal mixing bowl, lined with tinfoil and sprayed very well, then hollowed out a little opening for the door.  I think it looks great!  (said the proud mama)      Later, she melted chocolate, cooled it on a piece of parchment, and added this cute little “doormat.” Now if only she’d learn to wash up her mixing bowls when she’s through…

I wrote on here back in June about my deep-seated, irrational NEED for a piecaken.  If you don’t remember, or have no clue what that is, you can read about it here . So today I did – kind of.  Except it was an utter disaster, the most cr*ptacular confection I think I have ever confected. And in case anyone thinks I am some kind of Superwoman who never blogs her failures, here ya go, in delicious step-by-step horribility… Starting out on a promising foot with a delicious pie.  I used a sheet of malawach pastry for the top crust, rolled thin.  I’ve done it before and it actually makes a pretty decent, flaky / tasty crust.  Oh, inside this there is cherry pie filling.  And I cut proper vents, four of them, right in the middle. The top crust wasn’t attached perfectly at the edges, as you can see… …but that still doesn’t exactly explain what happened when I went to “decant” the pie on top of some of the cake mix.  Oh, yeah, did I mention I wh...