Curbing the Enthusiasm
I do this to myself a lot -- get excited about a project, get a little ahead of myself, and them BAM! Get knocked on my bum. My learning curve has spike strips on it ~ ha! So, yep, made a little perfumed/flavored sugar yesterday and excitedly presented it to the fam damily after dinner, to be used as an extra dip for the Turkish delight I picked up at the Armenian deli/bakery (Nina's is the BEST!), and I got varying reports of "Ugh!", "Yuck!", and barfing sounds. Okay. Back to the drawing board on that one . . . it illustrates the point that making perfumed food is the same as making perfume (duh!), it takes time and experimentation and PATIENCE! Maybe in a week the perfumed sugar will have settled and won't be such a nasty bit of indulgence. I'm thinking of adding it to the powdered sugar portion of a delicious almond cookie recipe I've been using for the holidays for something like 20 years. Yeah, I think it might work in there. In the meantime, I'm sticking with the candied citrus rinds. Except for maybe working on that petitgrain scone recipe . . . .
Citrus rinds rock in baked things. I made bergamot shortbread last winter. Grated bergamot rind, a little squeeze of the juice, and then proceed like regular shortbread.
ReplyDeleteAnd then I did some crazy sugar cookies where I grated an etrog citron and substituted Slivovitz for vanilla extract. Whew that was unique. Plum brandy and faintly astringent citrus. Good though.
The coolest thing was deep in the winter, when I did shortbread, but with grated baby ginger, some powdered ginger, and then bitter orange zest. It came out better than the bitter orange springerle (to be fair, those needed a bit more sugar).
Haven't messed with flavoring sugar other than with vanilla. Yet.
All those goodies sound interesting -- I usually stick with the basics: sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, almond cookies. This year I'm going to be a bit more adventurous. Ginger shortbread sounds delicious :)
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