November 2009 Archives

I went on a bit of a search for something that made use of almonds, seeing as I've got a bag of almond meal, and I was waiting a little longer before I go and make what I normally make that involves almond meal, and came upon something that wanted finely chopped almonds.  So I went a bit substitution mad, and swapped almond meal in, tweaked the spice mix to include other things like cardamom, and fennel, and black pepper, which seem to be commonly found among chai spices (seeing as I also didn't have allspice), and hoped for the best. They're a crumbly sort of cookie, not soft and chewy, or crisp and shattery.  One batch doesn't make that many, despite my attempts to shrink the original instructions to make tablespoonful-sized balls by going with teaspoonfuls instead (except I used the digital scales to try for a consistent size... I got good at estimating what 10g of cookie dough looked like!).

I originally read about this recipe over at Smitten Kitchen, back when we were in the middle of wintry weather, and now that we're hitting our strides with the summery stuff, I thought it was time to give this a go - it's got such a cute name!  I ended up with frozen blueberries, because last weekend the fresh blueberries weren't yet at best bang for buck kind of prices.

For whatever reason (mostly to do with pears being crunchy instead of soft when ripe which is odd to me and I forget that they exist), we had a large number of pears that were looking like they needed something to be done to them, or else they would be relegated binwards which is something I don't like doing unless I have to.  So ... I went on a search to find recipes that might make use of pears. No idea why, but pears and gingerbread seemed to turn up a lot in my searches, and seeing as we've got a slightly cooler patch today in the midst of what is definitely turning into warmer summery weather, I figured it was probably my last chance for a little while to make something that is probably more autumnal than summer in feel. I ended up altering the recipe a bit, mostly because I wanted to do one thing but had most of the stuff for another, and my multi-tasking skills in the morning don't extend to doing fiddly stuff in conjunction with wrangling X and his breakfast (: