Inspired by this recipe from Serious Eats, I decided to make a Texas sheet cake. I am not sure whether the name comes from a Texas dish or merely refers to the size of the cake. But it gave me a chance to use up some excess buttermilk.
The batter goes into a half-sheet pan. So long as you spread it out fairly evenly, heat will encourage it to find its own level.
Here is the cake fresh out of the oven.
I iced it with some leftover buttercream frosting from the freezer. The final adornment is several handfuls of Ellis Bros. pecans. I was worried that the cake's thinness would cause it to be dry but it was wonderfully moist. The chocolate and flavorful pecans make a perfect combination.
I made candied ginger a few years ago. It's not something I would do every day but I had a lot of fun doing it. I recently acquired a pressure cooker and it inspired an interesting idea to me: why not make candied ginger in the pressure cooker? It should be very soft and flavorful. Here is the result. I peeled two large ginger roots, cut them into small cubes, and put them in the pressure cooker with heavily sugared water. The traditional method first boils the ginger in plain water to soften it and then again in sugar water to candy it. The resulting candy was very tender but still with the characteristic ginger texture. It was also sweet without being overpowering. The traditional method leaves a lot of sugar crystallized around the ginger. The pressure cooker gives a much more subtle result. The ginger stays moist even after it cools but you can dry it in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. That inspired me to dip it in chocolate. While I was in the b...




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