If your family is sick of Pesach brownies, or never liked them in the first place, or you’re looking for something a little shmancier, why not turn regular brownies into… well, this little compact-brownie terrine-thing that I don’t have a name for?  (If after reading this post you know what it’s called, please leave a comment letting me know!) It reminds me of those 5-layer Pesach bar cakes that you can buy for ridiculous prices in stores… only much, much cheaper. I use two cast-iron loaf pans, which is nice because they’re heavy, thick and sturdy, but I imagine any two pans the same size will work.  (cast iron is also nice because it kashers for Pesach nice n’ easy when I self-clean the oven…). This is not so much a recipe as a technique I hope will inspire you to great heights of deliciousness. You may want to line your loaf pan with plastic wrap before you begin for ease of removal.  I forgot – doh! Bake two square pans of Pesach brownies (recipe below...

Once again, we had some friends over for what’s become an annual pre-Pesach ritual:  home matzah baking!   Not kosher-le-Pesach, of course, but still… fun. Recalling pitfalls from previous years, I vowed to: have enough rolling pins this year (everybody wants to roll!)* mix the dough by hand (no mixer – too sticky and, surprisingly, slower) no pasta roller – it produces more professional results but also, surprisingly, slower (previous years’ posts:  5772 , 5771 , 5770 (just us, no friends)) I also pre-measured the flour and water, so each bowl had 1 cup of flour, with 1/3 of a cup of water standing by to pour in. *NOTE:  To make sure I had enough rolling pins, I went to Home Depot yesterday and bought a 4-foot dowel (maybe 1.25” diameter?) and had them slice it into 4.  With a bit of sandpaper, a good washing, and a final oiling step, I had four perfectly useable kid-size rolling pins, for maybe $7-8.  (I did try Dollarama first...

Last Shabbos, Ted made brownies from a mix… and Sara came over and decorated it, all professional-like:   Happy happy chometz, nestled in its parchment… little suspecting Pesach is on its way!

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...

My big culinary surprise in Israel: poppy seeds are everywhere, disguised, in baked goods. Now, I like poppy seeds plenty, in their place. I like them generously sprinkled on bagels, pletzel and challahs. I will even tolerate them in mango dressing and lemon cake. But I do not eat poppy-seed hamentaschen, and it is a very bad surprise indeed to bite into what you think is some sort of chocolate dessert bar, only to realize that the “chocolate” is poppy. Or, the next night, into a piece of “banana cake,” only to realize that the speckles are not banana, but poppy. I think my issue is with dry, salty poppy seeds as a condiment (yum) vs wet, mushy poppy seeds as the main event (yuck!). Why are they so wildly popular over there, anyway??? You will notice I refrained from – in the jolly Purim spirit – calling them “poppy”-lar?  ;-)

Coming back from Israel just yesterday, I wanted hamentaschen that reflected all that we’d enjoyed there, culinarily.  I didn’t quite hit the mark, but I did come up with two cute variations… I used my usual dough recipe from Second Helpings, Please (image below), though I don’t love it because it tends to misbehave in unpredictable ways.  It has never come out the same way twice in twenty years (sigh, I feel so old saying that, but it’s true – the cookbook was a wedding present at my first wedding, and the children of that marriage are now far closer to 20 than to zero). This time, I did it in the food processor, where, of course, it totally jammed and made a sticky mess.  Ultimately, I added a lot more flour than usual and they came out okay.  It doesn’t taste like it usually does, but it worked. I always do one batch with a classic prune filling – or, as my baker sister likes to say, dried plums.  It just sounds so much swankier that way. For th...

Posted from my new BlackBerry PlayBook (so many mixed-capital letters!) because it takes decent pictures and I can get them up here right away.  Yay! Here’s tomorrow night’s pineapple upside-down cake – a vintage classic.  I admit, I have never loved pineapple anything , but we had the bottle of cherries sitting around,and the funky visual appeal of this cake is irresistible (indeed, I was moved to make this by a picture on a facebook friend’s profile).  Haven’t tasted it yet, but the recipe is pasted at the bottom of this post if you’d like to try it yourself. A big plus of this cake is that it’s “naturally” pareve, ie no messy recipe adaptations required.  A big minus, in some folks’ opinion, is that the main “moistener” is mayonnaise… well, that and boiling water.  If you can get past the idea that you’re eating mayonnaise cake, another plus is that you don’t need to add eggs.  You can also try part-mayo and part-yogurt or sour cream or buttermilk ...