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Though many of us are familiar with the use of fresh fruits in desserts, flavorings in candy, and other ubiquitous ingredients, a great deal are unusual. They're unusual in the sense that they're "not commonly occurring," or that we believe them to be so. With that, here are five ingredients you might find, but not expect, in your next dessert.

The post Five unusual ingredients in sweets appeared first on OUPblog.

How much do you know about all things sweet? Are you an obsessive "Top-tier Sugar Scholar"? Or are you a dabbling "Sugar Novice"? No matter your level of scholarship, if sweetness and obscure facts are your game, we have just the perfect quiz for you.

The post Are you a sugar scholar? appeared first on OUPblog.

Silent-screen star ZaSu Pitts is usually remembered for her extraordinary name, her huge eyes, and her fluttering fingers, but not many know that she also put her nimble fingers to confectionery use, crafting elegant candies that were famous on Hollywood sets.

The post ZaSu Pitts, the little-known confectioner appeared first on OUPblog.

Have you ever tried vinarterta? How about gugelhupf? Whether these are familiar or completely foreign to you, this list of sweets are a must for everyone with a sweet tooth. All the sweets, cakes, desserts, and treats on this list come from The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, so give them a go and try one, some, or all!

The post The 12 sweets you need to know about (and try) appeared first on OUPblog.

Hello readers! I’m sorry to have been M.I.A. I’ve been writing and sewing and all that good stuff, and hopefully I can share more about that soon.

In the meantime, here’s a dessert I made recently that was a big hit.

I like to go to pick-your-own farms, especially for apples, but since we couldn’t find a functioning apple farm, we went blueberry picking while in Western North Carolina over Labor Day. It was the end of the season—-slim pickin’s for sure—but still, the berries were delicious. We found the berry patch tucked in the hills. It had just rained, but the sun had come out, and though wet, it was such a gorgeous little spot.

I had planned to make a gluten-free blueberry pie from this book, but I ran out of energy for crust-making and just made the filling along with a half recipe of baked oatmeal. I then combined the two, and voila—blueberry cobbler sans gluten.

It had almost more of a pudding/ cake-like texture that was really lovely. The filling has the most surprising and wonderful secret ingredient: grated Granny Smith apple. Filling recipe here. At the time I actually didn’t have the tapioca, and it worked fine without it.

Baked oatmeal recipe here. I used gluten-free oats, halved the recipe, added some extra liquid, and did not soak overnight since I was in a hurry. When it was cooked, I roughly layered the still-warm filling with the baked oatmeal and baked (350, maybe?) until bubbly—not that long, maybe 10 minutes, tops.

Have you been reading anything good lately? I’ve been on such a memoir and nonfiction kick that I’m a bit worn out from it and have just started a novel called The Lonely Polygamist. So far, it’s hilarious.

On TV, loving the BBC’s Foyle’s War (WWII murder mystery) via netflix, and Borgen on DVD. Borgen is a Danish political drama featuring a female prime minister. Very smart and engaging, though it’s impossible to multitask while watching (due to subtitles and fast pacing).

Found a new podcast for writers: Narrative Breakdown with Scholastic editor Cheryl Klein. Really good, meaty stuff. Also found a mention of my easy reader, Slowpoke, in Books that Teach Kids How to Write by Marianne Saccardi. The author uses Slowpoke as an example showing kids how to slow down and notice the details they need to enrich their writing. Fun, eh? I’m honored.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a couple of quilts, but they’re slow-going. Nothing exciting to report. What’s new with you?

We actually made these around Christmas, as a rainy day activity with the kids. We just followed Martha Stewart’s recipe and added some crushed peppermint candy on top.

We loved the way the concoction of sugar and gelatin morphs into white foam. It made me feel like a chemist (my chemist grandfather, by the way, loves to make candy and measures things out neatly on little squares of waxed paper).

True to form, I tried to cut out some of the sugar, as drowning the finished cubes in yet more white stuff seemed a bit excessive. Turns out, though, that you kind of need the powdered sugar on top at the end to keep the marshmallows from being a total sticky mess. It’s like flour, I guess, when you’re rolling out pizza dough.

Marshmallows weren’t hard to make but they were definitely messy, even for my high mess threshold. I would totally recommend a giveaway plan, since even my kids, who were sure they’d want to eat the whole pan on their own, couldn’t finish them before they were past their prime (a couple of days).

The best part for me was having a giant marshmallow (we call them marsh planets) to put in my hot cocoa, which I made not-too-sweet on purpose.

For more of my cooking and eating adventures, go here.

Around these parts we’re still being absolutely buried by fourth grade homework (what’s up with that?). I’m still loving, really loving My Berlin Kitchen by food blogger Lisa Weiss of The Wednesday Chef. It’s got love, travel, international friends and family, and recipes to boot. Currently dreaming of baby artichokes with potatoes and separately, braised endive. Never thought I’d be interested in endive, but she makes it sound so exciting! As an added bonus, the book is making me want to keep writing, and in my mind that’s the best kind of book.

I’ve been sewing a bit, some of which you can see on my Instagram feed. You can find me there under Emily Smith Pearce or in the lower righthand corner of my blog homepage.

This interview with writer/ director David O. Russell (of Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle) was so good I may have to listen to it again. I also loved reading this interview with the author, the illustrator, and the translator of Sydney Taylor Award honor book The War Within These Walls. The translator (Laura Watkinson) is a friend of mine in Amsterdam, and the interviewer (Joyce Moyer Hostetter) is a friend here in North Carolina. Small world!

Also just sent out my nonfiction manuscript to some early reader friends. So excited to be moving ahead with it. How are you? Cooking/ reading/ watching anything good?

We served these yesterday to non-gluten-free guests, and they were a hit with everyone, kids and grown-ups alike. They have a nice, chewy texture.

I actually made them egg-free as well (using egg substitute) since one of our guests is allergic to eggs. The cookies have a lot of butter in them, but next time I may try coconut oil, since I’ve made similar cookies with regular flour and coconut oil in the past, and they were great.

The recipe is once again from Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking by Peter and Kelli Bronski. You can find the recipe on their blog here.

Today, we made a little candy! So I’ll show you that when I have time. Hope you’re cozied up with loved ones and enjoying festivities.

P.S. We got a special Christmas supplement to the newspaper today: a cup of water and an earthworm fell out when I removed plastic bag #1! Luckily the paper itself was dry and wormless. Gives you an idea of how much rain we’ve had in the last day or so.

I can’t take any credit for this pie, other than having been an experienced taste-tester. At my kids’ request, my mother-in-law took the reins on this project during a recent visit.

She used the pastry recipe here from Artisanal Gluten-Free Cooking and her favorite apple pie filling recipe for the center. According to her, the dough was “terrible, just terrible to work with,” but of course GF doughs are often tricky and tend to fall apart a lot. We wondered if using a pastry cloth would’ve made it easier (I don’t have one). Still, though, isn’t it a beautiful pie?

The results are so delicious that I would definitely try this again, tricky dough or not! A certain anonymous person (not a gluten-free eater) even tried to eat more than his allotted share.

I would say the pastry was a bit more crackery in texture than traditional dough, but it was still yummy. I think I’ll try it again at Thanksgiving, though I may use a crumble-top instead of a pastry top.

Currently reading America’s Women by Gail Collins. She’s got such a fresh voice and fantastic sense of humor—-this is the way history should be written.

A few of posts around the web that caught my fancy recently:

–this one from Amy Karol of Angry Chicken about using free digital art from the Rijksmuseum

–a glow-in-the-dark party over at Elsie Marley

–love, loooove this collaboration between an illustrator and her 4-year-old

Hope you had a great weekend. Ours was long and relatively lazy. We even started some Christmas crafting. Feels a little early, but I know it’ll be here before we know it. I even went totallly nerdo and made a spreadsheet of the gifts I’ve already purchased and squirreled away. I have more of a head start than I thought. Woohooo!

The kids and I have made a list of fun things to do this summer, and one of them is to make popsicles.

This was our first batch, made with this recipe, from the blog Oven Love, found through Pinterest. I love that they’re non-dairy, made with coconut milk and real orange juice. They were a hit. Next I think we’ll freeze our favorite peanut-butter-chocolate-banana smoothies. With maybe a little coconut milk. Do you have any favorite popsicle combos?

Meg of elsiemarley.com suggested that readers share short posts about fun summer activities . If you’d like to play along, leave a comment on Meg’s blog and use the words “Summer Journal” in your blog title or as a hashtag if you’re instagramming or whatnot. While you’re at it, let me know in my comments, too!

For more posts on food, including recipes, click here. I like to cook with less meat and dairy, more veggies, and I do a lot of gluten-free stuff, too.

by Theresa Collier, Publicity In case you have not followed along from Wednesday’s post, Overlook is publishing Nigel Slater’s Real Fast Food and Real Fast Desserts in paperback next week.  I’ve sliced, mixed, braised, and baked my way through four simple recipes starting with “Chicken with Olives and Oranges” and “Bulgur Wheat with Mango and Mint.”  Real Fast Desserts, a follow-up spawned

Lately, I want to blog about food. This is partially because I've been cooking a lot more--I like to cook, mind you--and partially because I've been experimenting a little more as I cook. I can usually get something on the table for dinner most nights, although Cora tends to delay stuff sometimes.

I'm a little behind on getting the photos for this and the next post or two off of my camera, but I figured, better late than never!

For St. Patrick's Day, I present the Country Rhubarb Cake.


I know, I know, it totally looks like a pie. But the recipe is from Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best - Over 700 Recipes Show You Why, and she calls it a Country Rhubarb Cake. It basically looks like a pie, but the inside... the inside is filled with ruby-red, glistening rhubarb.



And the cross-sectioning just shows how utterly delicious it is. The crust isn't a typical pie crust; it's more like a biscuit crust with a wee bit of shortbread, if anything. But it soaks up all of the delicious juices that the rhubarb releases, besides being tasty, so I really can't quibble about whether it's a pie or a cake or some sort of hybrid.

I followed the recipe pretty much as it was written with just one major change: I chopped the rhubarb up ahead of time, mixed it with the heaping cup of white sugar, then added some dark brown sugar into the filling, too. Then, I left it all to macerate, while I worked on the crust.

It goes beautifully with whipped cream.

Here's a quick digital painting for this week's Illustration Friday. Cupcakes have become so popular in recent years and you will be too if you take them to work or school.I suffer from a fierce and demanding sweet-tooth, but so far the trendy cupcake has failed to seduce me. Cookies, ice cream, and tiramisu - I'm still yours and yours alone. For now....

OUP’s Online Marketing Manager Stephanie Porter reflects on the beers to accompany her Thanksgiving meal.

Thanksgiving is all about tradition, and if you are like my family, your dinner will probably be served with wine. But having recently spent some time with The Oxford Companion to Beer and its Editor-in-Chief Garrett Oliver, I am thinking about adding a little twist to the end of the meal.

“Dessert, often thought of as the province of sweet wine, is actually usually better with beer. The maxim in wine—that the wine must be at least as sweet as the dessert—does not hold force with beer. In fact, it is the relief of sweetness from the palate that is the key to success. After a few forkfuls, the palate is overwhelmed by the sugar in most desserts. That is one reason why coffee often seems so pleasant with dessert; it is not nearly as sweet as the dessert.”

So after the turkey has been carved, eaten, and relocated to the fridge for tomorrow’s sandwiches, I will be breaking out a few choice beers to serve alongside my cousin’s famous French silk pie. Here are a few easy suggestions for incorporating a delicious brew into your Thanksgiving dinner. According to The New Republic reviewer Alexander Nazaryan, it might be almost as American as apple pie.

Pour a coffee flavored stout with your pecan pie:

Not to suggest that you have to forgo the coffee altogether, but my mouth starts to water just thinking about this pairing.

“Bigger beers with some caramel or roasted character tend to do best. With a chocolate tart, for example, we can pair a coffeeish, chocolaty imperial stout. In this pairing, we have both contrast and harmony—the
roasted malts match the chocolate, whereas the beer cleanses the palate of sweetness; the dessert can come back tasting fresh.”

I would aim for something with rich flavor, but that isn’t too heavy. I might go for two of my all-time favorite beers, Full Sail Session Black or Köstritzer Schwarzbier. But any of the beers listed in this link—Great Brewer’s Beers with a coffee flare—(or in your grocer’s isle) could have a similarly great effect.

Swap a Pumpkin Ale for your Pumpkin Pie:

As full as I am after a big meal, it just wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving without a little something sweet to finish it all off. And since pumpkin ale is an American original, it seems even more fitting.

“As a general rule, pumpkin ale has an orange to amber color, a biscuit-like malt aroma, and a warming pumpkin aroma. Modern pumpkin ales are almost always made with “pumpkin pie spices,” which usually include cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and sometimes vanilla and ginger. The finish tends to be dry because of many fermentable sugars derived from the pumpkin.”

Pumpkin ale has seems like it has secured its place in bars and bottles across the country, so you should have no trouble picking up this new classic. I love the light flavor of Brooklyn’ Brewery’s Post Road Pumpkin Ale, but as this would be in lieu of pumpkin pie, I might go for something with even more pie-like goodness like Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale. Check out Draft Magazine’s Pumpkin picks, too.

Pour a rich barrel-aged beer over vanilla ice cream:

This pairing is all about pleasant contrast. Concurrent with the flavor of the wood itself may be the flavor of whatever beverage the barrel h

Chocolate chip…white chocolate macadamia nut…peanut butter…oatmeal raisin…sugar…  Yep, we’re getting hungry too, given that laundry list of fabulous cookies!  What’s your favorite kind of cookie?

I love making a storytime theme out of things that I personally enjoy – it keeps things fresh after your 100th storytime, not to mention I think that your enthusiasm really shines through for a topic in which you’re personally invested.  So, if you’re like me, you can try a cookie-themed storytime:

SONG/RHYME:
“Who Stole the Cookie from the Cookie Jar?”

STORIES:

COOKIES: BITE-SIZE LIFE LESSONS by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Jane Dyer

COOKIEBOT! by Katie Van Camp, illustrated by Lincoln Agnew (watch the adorable book trailer)

CRAFT:

Food version – Use already-baked cookies and let kids decorate with sprinkles, frosting, chocolate chips, dried cranberries, raisins, and anything else delicious you can think of.

Non-food Version – Cut out circles of paper and let kids decorate their “cookies” with confetti, strips of paper, glitter (if your library allows it), stickers.

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By Anatoly Liberman

It seems reasonable that brisket should in some way be related to breast: after all, brisket is the breast of an animal.  But the path leading from one word to the other is neither straight nor narrow.  Most probably, it does not even exist.  In what follows I am greatly indebted to the Swedish scholar Bertil Sandahl, who published an article on brisket and its cognates in 1964.  The Oxford English Dictionary has no citations of brisket prior to 1450, but Sandahl discovered bresket in a document written in 1328-1329, and if his interpretation is correct, the date should be pushed back quite considerably.  Before 1535, the favored (possibly, the only) form in English was bruchet(te).

The English word is surrounded with many look-alikes from several languages: Middle French bruchet, brichet, brechet (Modern French bréchet ~ brechet “breastbone”; in French dialects, one often finds -q- instead of -ch-), Breton bruch ~ brusk ~ bresk “breast (of a horse),” along with bruched “breast,” Modern Welsh brysced (later brwysged ~ brysged), and Irish Gaelic brisgein “cartilage (as of the nose).”  Then there are German Bries ~ Briesel ~ Brieschen ~ Bröschen “the breast gland of a calf,” Old Norse brjósk “cartilage, gristle,” and several words from the modern Scandinavian languages for “sweetbread” (Swedish bräs, Norwegian bris, and Danish brissel), which, as it seems, belong here too (sweetbread is, of course, not bread: it is the pancreas or thymus, especially of a calf, used as food; -bread in sweetbread is believed to go back to an old word for “flesh”).  Many words for “breast” in the languages of the world begin with the grating sound groups br- ~ gr- ~ -khr-, as though to remind us of our breakable, brittle, fragile bones (fraction, fragile, and fragment, all going back to the same Latin root, once began with bhr).

At first blush, brisket, with its pseudo-diminutive suffix, looks like a borrowing from French.  But there is a good rule: a word is native in a language in which it has recognizable cognates.  To be sure, sometimes no cognates are to be seen or good candidates present themselves in more languages than one, but etymology is not an exact science, and researchers should be thankful for even approximate signposts along the way.  In French, bréchet is isolated (and nothing similar has been found in other Romance languages), while in Germanic, brjósk, bris, bräs, and others (see them above) suggest kinship with brisket.  Therefore, the opinion prevails that brisket is of Germanic origin.  Émile Littré, the author of a great, perennially useful French dictionary, thought that the French word had been borrowed from English during the Hundred Year War (1337-1453), and most modern etymologists tend to agree with him.  Then the Celtic words would also be from English (for they too are isolated in their languages), and the etymon of brisket would be either Low (that is, northern) German bröske “sweetbread” or Old Norse brjósk, allied to Old Engl. breosan “break.”  The original meaning of brisket may have been “something (easily breakable?) in the breast of a (young?) animal.”  If so, contrary to expectation, brisket is not related to breast, for breast appears to have been coined with the sense “capable of swelling,” r

Two twin cupcakes, my little almost edible sculpted acrylic paintings. See the progress here.

Close-up:

This image just kind of evolved with no plan, starting out with the mother and daughter sitting at a table (which I wish weren’t pink, but oh well). This style I mess with, many times I use no rough or sketch to work off of. I like to see where it goes. As for the dessert, I would pick the chocolate cake. The more chocolaty, the better!

Out of these four choices, which would YOU choose..?

A week ago, Ryan at POM Wonderful offered to send me a case of pomegranate juice to welcome me back to blogging; how could I say no?

After receiving the shipment, I immediately began to think of ways to incorporate those antioxidant filled juices into my diet. Aside from the obvious option of drinking the pom juice, I wanted to create something that I knew my family would enjoy.

I went to something foolproof: I made ice cream. And it’s okay, that I’m feeding my family ice cream, because it’s got antioxidants, right?

Pomegranate Ice Cream

• 1 cup pomegranate juice
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 2 1/4 cups cream

1. Combined pomegranate juice and lemon juice.
2. Add sugar to liquids and whisk until dissolved.
3. Add cream.
4. Whisk until soft peaks form.
5. Freeze for at least for hours (or overnight).

Enjoy.

I read Eat, Pray, Love several years ago while I was vacationing in Taiwan. It was a wonderful memoir that I truly enjoyed, and like many other fans, my favorite section was the one about Italy. Who doesn’t love the idea of reveling in a nation that is known for its pursuit of pleasures?

Unfortunately, I’ve never been to Italy. And although I’m looking forward to savoring Naples pizza, marveling over the mesmerizing architecture and indulging in decadent gelato someday (hopefully soon), I’ll take homemade biscotti any time, any day.

Biscotti

• 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 1/4 cup applesauce*
• 1 cup white sugar*
• 3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 eggs
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 Tbs. almond extract, 1/2 Tbs. vanilla extract

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
2. In a medium bowl, beat together the oil, eggs, sugar and anise flavoring until well blended. Combine the flour and baking powder, stir into the egg mixture to form a heavy dough. Divide dough into two pieces. Form each piece into a roll as long as your cookie sheet. Place roll onto the prepared cookie sheet, and press down to 1/2 inch thickness.
3. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes in the preheated oven, until golden brown. Remove from the baking sheet to cool on a wire rack. When The cookies are cool enough to handle, slice each one crosswise into 1/2 inch slices. Place the slices cut side up back onto the baking sheet. Bake for an additional 6 to 10 minutes on each side. Slices should be lightly toasted.

Note: You may be tempted to add more flour once you start rolling the dough–don’t. You may flour your kitchen surface or hands to avoid sticky flour syndrome, but try not to add anymore flour into the actual dough.

* I substituted half of the oil with applesauce. It’s undetectable and does not affect texture.
** I used a no-calorie sweetener substitute. It turns out well.

The cookies are slightly sweet, with a subtle almond fragrance that goes well with coffees and teas. You may also drizzle with chocolate and garnish with crushed nuts (see photo above), if you prefer.