Sunday, March 23, 2014

Chai Tea

This is the chai tea recipe I made today.  Not sure if this is gonna be my final recipe but it's at least a decent start.  I will probably cut back the tea since I'm pretty hopped up right now after having this after like 3 hours of sleep last night.  If I'm feeling motivated maybe I'll do a few more batches to get a better understanding of what each of the spices is bringing and then work it out with the scale.

What started this is I got green cardamom pods.  I got maybe a half a cup of them for $0.50! You know you're jealous.

Based off of this recipe

Chai Tea

Ingredients

12 oz water
1 (1-inch) piece cinnamon stick
 2 green cardamom pods, smashed
4 whole cloves
1/2 star anise
2 quarter-sized coins fresh ginger
1 heaping teaspoon black tea leaves
sweetened condensed milk, to taste

Directions

Boil the water.
Steep all the ingredients for 15 minutes.
Heat as needed to keep just below a boil.

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Eclairs

Look I'm writing a post!

So I made eclairs.  In case you couldn't tell from the title.  Though if you couldn't tell from the title then you probably aren't reading this.

Anyway.

Pastry cream.  Chocolate glaze.  Some sort of shell.  What's not to like?

So here are my not so glamorous glamor shots:



I followed this recipe.  Well, for the most part.  Because I'm mentally incapable of following a recipe.

I didn't have any cream and the eclairs were in the oven when I realized it.  So I used some butter with the chocolate for the glaze.
Oh and I used home made vanilla extract rather than steeping the vanilla bean.  And probably some other little things that I can't think of.

It's good to bake again, like from scratch.  It's been a while.  Well, I've done some savory stuff but baking pastries is just mentally different.  I should make some cookies.  Or pie.  mmmm I should make pie for Pi day.



On another note, I've started my first batch of seeds.  Tomatoes, tomatilloes, peppers, a few other random ones, I forget which else.  Right now they are seeds on a damp paper towel sitting on my heater.  I'll transfer them to seed starting soil in a few days assuming I have some sprouts going by then.  Hopefully I'll do better this year with seeds than the last few years.  And hopefully the snow will melt sometime.  My raised beds are 10" tall but I can barely tell where they are because they are still covered in snow.