Momofuku’s Banana Cream Pie, only slightly butchered.

I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix since LongJohn was born – it helps to pass the time while being forced to stay perfectly stationary for long periods of time. I figured going into this that I’d try to stick with documentaries – that way I could educate myself and if I was interrupted (which I often am) then I wouldn’t miss too much plot if they played in the background while I did something else. And so I’ve been watching a ton of cooking documentaries, and I just finished plowing through The Mind of a Chef. In the first season, the focus is largely on David Chang, owner of Momofuku in New York. One of the segments features his pastry chef, who whips up a banana cream pie like it was nothing.

It looked so easy I figured I could do it even with LongJohn around. And then I had to think about that for a minute. This recipe involves making a custard, and uses four different kitchen appliances, some of them more than once. It really isn’t THAT easy, but it’s easy for me NOW to do. Talk to me five years ago and I would never have attempted this, or I would have addressed it as a challenge. It’s weird how much this blog has made me grow as someone who cooks things. But on to the pie, which is semi-easy if you’ve made things in the kitchen before. I set up a mis en place because I knew LongJohn could interrupt me at any time.

I also took my butter and, because my microwave is all the way in the basement, I set it outside on my back porch in the sun to melt. I’m that lazy.

Plus it was like 33°C, which is more than warm enough to melt butter.

You like my squinty face?

And so it did.

The recipe I used printed everything in weights (ounces and grams) so I’m going to use ounces here – my apologies. Get your kitchen scale ready. Start with 8 oz very ripe bananas (this is like two). These are the black ones that you chuck in your freezer. Pitch those into a blender together with 2 3/4 oz whipping cream, and 2 1/4 oz milk and blend the crap out of them until they’re lovely and smooth.

Next, tip in 3 1/2 oz sugar, 1 oz cornflour (I’ve come to realize that this is a Britishism for cornstarch, not masa harina, which I used – butchery #1), a pinch of salt, and 3 large egg yolks. Blend that again, scraping down the sides of the blender, until the colour is uniform.

Pour that stuff into a medium saucepan and cook over medium-low heat, whisking often, until the mixture thickens. Clean your blender while this is going on.

The recipe says to bring it to a boil but mine never did. Eventually it will be a very heavy paste that holds its shape. Pour the thick stuff back into the blender.

Grab 2 leaves gelatin or 1 pouch gelatin (I thought a leaf equaled a pouch and used two pouches – butchery #2) and follow the instructions to make it “bloom”. When it’s ready, chuck it in the blender along with 1 1/2 oz butter and blend until smooth (again).

Next, drop in 1/2 teaspoon yellow food colouring (otherwise your pie will be brown not  yellow) and blend again until the pie is artificially crazy yellow (it will get lighter later, I promise).

Pour the yellow goo into a container and chill it for 30-60 minutes.

While that’s happening, make the chocolate crumb for your crust (I actually did this first, because it made more sense to me). Preheat your oven to 300°F and stir together 3 1/2 oz plain flour, 1 teaspoon cornflour (again, cornstarch), 3 1/2 oz sugar, 2 oz cocoa powder, and 1 teaspoon salt.

Tip in 3 oz melted butter (yay, the sun!) and beat until small clusters form.

Spread the clusters on a baking sheet and bake for 20 minutes. The clusters should be still moist but will dry out as they cool. In order for this to happen they have to be a bit bigger than what you see in the picture, because these will burn (so either cook them for less time or make them bigger – butchery #3). Apparently this makes more than you need for a 10″ pie so you will only use 3/4 of it but I didn’t want to waste it or store it so I used it all in my 9″ pie plate and it was totally fine.

Once the clusters have cooled, chuck them into a food processor and pulse until they turn sandy and there are no chunks left.

Tip these granules into a bowl and toss with 2 teaspoons sugar and 1 tablespoon melted butter.

Work that with your hands until the stuff is moist enough to knead into a ball (I did not do this because my poor carpal tunnel hands are killing me). Press that into the pan. I did it with just the crumbs and it was fine (butchery #4).

Don’t forget to press it firmly into all the corners of the pan – you don’t want it to be too thick there.

Now for the rest of the banana cream. Whisk 6 1/2 oz whipping cream and 5 3/4 oz icing sugar together until stiff peaks form (remember that it helps to chill your beater and the bowl beforehand).

Tip in your cooled yellow goo and mix, mix, mix.

See? I told you it would get paler.

Tip half the goo into your pie shell. Cut up another, less ripe banana (I used two because they were kind of weenie) and spread that around on the surface. You can get fancy with the layout but nobody’s going to see it.

Add the rest of the goo and smooth it out. Make sure none of the banana pieces are sticking out because they will oxidize and turn brown.

Chill the pie for a little while then serve and eat within a day or two. Enjoy!

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A Bit of Frou-Frou

I have an empty space on the bookshelf in my office and because it’s a dark bookshelf in a dark corner I wanted to add a little bit of whimsy that would light up the area – literally.

I had all these plastic gems I picked up from the dollar store a few years back, and a conveniently-sized plastic jar into which they could go.

When I poured them in I shoved in a set of battery-powered LEDs as well, for – well, for the purposes of lighting things up.

Then I re-created a version of my paper peonies that I made a few years ago.

And I stuck them in on top.

So now I have glowing peonies. In my office.  And I’m okay with that.

Gelatin Plastic

This is the beginning stage of a pretty major undertaking I’m … undertaking. But it’s taking some time to get all my pieces in order so I thought I’d start with a bit of a teaser post for you. Did you know you can make plastic out of gelatin and water? I kid you not. And once you start playing around with all the different things you can do with it, it opens up the possibility for lots of super fun crafts, and it’s totally something you can do with kids. To start, you need some gelatin (I used powdered), some food colouring (optional, if you want your plastic tinted), something to cut your plastic with (I have a cookie cutter for big circles and a straw for little ones), and a smooth, relatively flexible, shallow plastic or silicone dish. Many people use the flexible lids to margarine containers and the like.

For every little pouch of gelatin you use, you’ll need 3 tablespoons water.

I used 4 pouches in my experiments so I needed 12 tablespoons water, or 3/4 cup water. I plopped that in a small saucepan with food colouring and turned it to low heat.

Tip in your gelatin and stir it gently to dissolve all of it.

Don’t feel the need to whisk it or start a stirring frenzy as this will cause your gelatin to foam and you won’t have a nice clear result. You’ll get a bit of foam at the edges but nothing serious.

Once you have heated the gelatin water enough that all the gelatin is dissolved and the liquid is clear again, pour it into your little dishes (I used two 6″ x 8″ dishes) and smooth it out with a spatula so that all the surfaces are covered. Try to pop any bubbles you see, but a few are okay.

Now leave that puppy alone for about 45 minutes. After that time you will have gelatin that is set but is still flexible. You can peel it out of your dish super easily, but do it slowly as it can tear.

I used a cookie cutter to cut out large circles, and a shot glass to cut out smaller ones.

Then I used a straw to cut out hanging holes from all my circles.

The excess is weird and floopy.

But cool to play with. It’s totally edible (but doesn’t taste that great) and you can chuck it in the compost.

Then I set the circles to dry. I did a lot of trial and error with drying these things. There’s a school that wants you to set them on a paper towel, under another paper towel, sealed just under the lid of a tupperware container, but I didn’t have much luck with that, nor did a bunch of the people who have already done this project and posted it on the internet. In this picture you can see I set the circles on parchment paper to try, but of course paper wrinkles when wet.

So I ended up with these wrinkled chip things when these were dry (which takes a couple days).

I had also laid a second piece of parchment over top to help hold the drying circles down and prevent them from warping, but it only helped a little, and the paper’s surface got copied onto the circles, leaving a matte finish.

I found when I left them on a smooth surface (in this case, plastic wrap taped to my counter) then they warped more but they were totally clear, and I preferred that.

I also let some dry completely inside the dishes, and ended up with a big sheet of (still warped) plastic.

You can cut this stuff easily with scissors.

And it’s also compostable.

It’s going to take me a while to get all the little circles made that I need but I have a due date of September so stay tuned!

Have You Tried Milk Art?

This is a super popular project for folks with kids, because you can teach them all about surface tension and the properties of soap and fat and all that good science-y stuff in a nice controlled environment, with very pretty results.

The supplies are simple: a large shallow tray (a rimmed baking sheet will do), watercolour paper (sized to fit in your tray), cotton swabs, liquid food colouring, a few drops liquid dish soap, and some milk. You can use almond milk or rice milk or homogenized milk or cream or whatever — you just need some milk with a decent fat content. The results will apparently differ depending on the milk you use (almond milk is supposedly the best), but I only had regular old 2% on hand so I can’t really speak to that.

On a level surface, pour milk into your tray so that the whole bottom is just covered.

Now start dotting the surface of the milk with food colouring. Go with whatever floats your boat.

Take a cotton swab and dip it in your dish soap.

Gently touch the swab to your milk surface. POW! Watch that science happen.

This is that same spot a few seconds later.

Touch the swab all over to make the  colours mix or drag it across the surface to make a trail.

Now lay your paper down flat on the surface of the milk, then slide it off.

Let it drip a bit and lay it or hang it somewhere to dry.

I liked how the colours kept changing as I put in more paper, so I didn’t replace my milk, but you can if you like.

After a while I had nine full sheets and I was quite pleased with the results.

You can do whatever you want with these sheets: cut them into shapes and frame them, use them as stationery or greeting cards … whatever you want.

In my case, I ironed them flat using the high steam setting on my iron.

You can tell that I let this one dry on a sheet of newspaper can’t you?

Then I played around with the order of them a bit.

And used Blu-Tack to put them up on the wall in our bedroom.

The colours I used complement the other quick wall art I made a few weeks ago so I am very happy with how they turned out – though I would like to try it with almond milk sometime.

Home Made Watercolour Paints

This is a great gift for the artist in your family, young or old, or a neat thing to have on hand for any young visitors over the holiday season. They can be made with materials you probably have in your cupboards, which makes for a cost-conscious addition to your holiday crafting.

And because it’s all easy-peasy and non-toxic, I’m sure that kids will enjoy making their own colours – provided you don’t mind a little mess! This is a rather time consuming project, with all the stirring of tiny pots of colour, so if you do it with smaller children be prepared to finish the job once they get bored.

In terms of hardware, you’re going to need two plastic ice cube trays. I picked these up in the clearance section of Target. You can also use silicone trays, and then pop the solidified paint out to use somewhere else. You will also need some disposable stir sticks (one, or one side, for each colour).

And lots of food colouring. You can use both liquid and gel paste for this. I also added some metallic powder pigment to the mix.

Now grab a couple measuring cups. Scoop up 1 cup baking soda, and plop it in large (~4-cup) measuring cup or bowl with a pouring spout.

Pour in 3/4 cup white vinegar.

Keep stirring until all the fizzies are gone.

Next dribble in 2 tablespoons lily white corn syrup (the darker stuff will discolour the paint).

Then dump in 1 cup corn starch.

Mixy-mixy. You want this as smooth as possible, as it will settle quickly.

With everything mixed up, distribute the white liquid evenly amongst your trays. I found the given recipe to fill each section a little more than 3/4 full, but it depends on the size of your trays.

Now start colouring! Dip the end of a stir stick into your colour and drop a little bit into the tray.

Stir, stir stir!

I added a bit more because this was my black one, after all, and I wanted it to be dark. Again, make sure to scrape up the bottom as you stir, because all the powders are starting to settle.

With the gel paste colour, as you can see here with my red and brown, you will get little solid pieces that float while you stir. Don’t worry about them. Stir in as much as you can, then leave them alone for a few minutes and let the liquid get into the colour. They’ll dissolve if you go and stir them again a little bit later. I promise.

The liquid food colouring was much easier to mix in. Don’t forget you can easily create your own colours!

I did find that some of the colours kind of settled and separated, so I ended up re-stirring them a few times. I needn’t have worried, however: as the water in the liquid evaporates they will all come back together again.

I cleaned up the edges of the trays with a damp cloth after the mixes were starting to settle and dry. It was super quick. I ended up leaving these alone for a whole week just to ensure they were dry all the way through, but you may find you have dry paint within a couple of days.

To test the paints I created a colour guide. I had fun with the names.

I’m actually really pleased with how the metallic ones turned out. All I did was add the plain metallic powder to the liquid, without any other pigment.

And added some brushes to complete the gift.

Homemade Sugar Cubes

This quick DIY comes from nifty thrifty things and would make a great last-minute gift for someone who likes a little bit of sweet in their tea. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s something you can customize with your own flair, and, my favourite: it’s as cheap as you want it to be.

The basic ingredients you need for this are crystallized sugar and water, though you can dress the sugar and water up as much as you want. Here I have an organic coconut sugar, which adds a bit of flavour to things you sweeten.

Grab your sugar, a small bowl of water, another small bowl for mixing, and a pretty ice cube tray or candy mold. And some wee tea spoons.

Pour about 1/2 cup of the sugar into the mixing bowl, and use one of the tea spoons to dribble a little bit of water onto the sugar. Like, very little. Mix it in with the other spoon. Keep adding a little bit more at a time, a few drops here and there, until you kind of have a sugar paste, but the sugar has not yet dissolved. If you get that far, then you’ve gone too far.

Spoon the sugar paste into the ice cube tray or candy mold and press it down with your fingers to compact it. Then do the whole thing again until you’ve filled up the entire tray.

I spritzed a bit of water on the top of this tray to tamp things down a bit.

Leave that to dry overnight, then pop the cubes out and enjoy! Make sure they’re totally dry before you remove them, or they will crumble …

Other options: if you’ve ever made vanilla sugar before, by whazzing a dried vanilla bean with granulated sugar in a food processor and leaving it to “steep” for a week or so, then I’m sure you’d love the option of making vanilla sugar into cubes.

Another idea would be lavender sugar, which you make the same way as vanilla sugar (but with lavender flowers, silly, not vanilla beans). I added 2 drops pink and 2 drops blue food colouring to make it purply.

You could also do this with brown sugar, as opposed to white sugar, though the darker the sugar is the less water I would use, as it’s already pretty sticky with molasses.

Finally, what about changing up the water options? You can use rose water or orange blossom water instead of regular water to add a lovely aroma to your sugar cubes. I added a drop of food colouring to the rose water to add a tint to the cubes.

Pretending it’s Spring with a Feather Bouquet

So.  If you’re anywhere in the world that has been experiencing winter this year, you know that it pretty much has universally sucked.  In Ottawa, and Canada in general, we just got wind that winter isn’t ending anytime soon.  In fact, the forecast is so depressing that our country’s senior government meteorologist has gone into hiding.  I kid you not.

So I’m doing what I do every year and going into denial.  I’m going to pretend it’s spring with a pretty fake bouquet in my front hall.

I picked up a bag of feathers from Value Village for $1.99 about two weeks ago.  Inside the bag were four packages of craft feathers from White Rose, which was a craft supply store similar to Michael’s that went out of business when I was a teenager.

Three packs of white chicken feathers and one pack of dyed chicken/other bird feathers.

Also, holy smokes feathers are staticky.

I didn’t want an all white bouquet with accents of brown, so I decided to dye the feathers to suit my mood.  I’ll leave the ones that are already coloured for something else.

Find a dye-proof container (usually a glass bowl), and drop in 4 cups hot water, 2 teaspoons white vinegar, and lots of food colouring in the colour of your choice.  I went with red, purple, and orange.

Jam those feathers in and squish them down.  You want to bedraggle them as much as possible.  You can un-bedraggle (undraggle?) them later once they’re dried.

Leave them in the dye baths for 5 to 15 minutes.  The longer you leave them in, the darker they will get.

I picked plastic bins for my dye batches because I could cover them when I left them unsupervised.  I suspect if you have small grabby children this might come in handy.

Pull the feathers out of the dye baths and set them to dry for several hours on a paper towel.  Just a warning that until the feathers are completely dry, they will still stain things with food colouring, so be careful where you set them.

I thought that the orange batch was doing better than the other two, and I later found out why.  In the orange batch, you can see that I only have two of these long feathers with the rounded tips.  All the other ones have the flat tips.

In the red/pink, the proportion of long round ones is higher.  For some reason these round ones are more waterproof (I’m sure someone who knows more about feathers knows why but I don’t really care).

The purple batch had the most round feathers of them all, and so came out the palest overall.

But I wanted variety, so variety I got. And I also dyed my fingers quite well.

Once they’re dry you can fluff them out again.

Then I took a spool of thread and got to winding the feathers together at the stems, one by one, starting with the smaller ones in the centre.

I added larger and larger ones as I kept going, eventually tying off the “bloom” with lots of thread left over.

One down, several more to go …

This is definitely a job you will want to do while watching or listening to something else.

When I finished, I took a branch I found in the park and used the loose thread to wind the feather bundle to the thread.

All finished.

The Pie thinks the pink ones turned out the best, with the colour gradient, but I’m partial to the orange ones.

Pseudo-Peonies

While the weather might be warmer than it was before, and while I pulled these lovely daffodils out of my garden last week …

… my garden still looks like this.  Which means that my peonies haven’t bloomed yet.  If they’re going to bloom at all.  And I like peonies.  They’re one of my favourites.

So I’m going to make my own here.  It’s not that hard.  I found a quick tutorial at Two Shades of Pink and had at it.

Start with a bunch of coffee filters.  I don’t know how many.  A bunch.

And some warm water.  And some food colouring.  Or watercolour paint.

Dissolve some of your paint/dye in the water. This is some Crayola stuff I broke off and stirred in.

I tried this craft paint but it wasn’t water soluble, not really.

Then dip your filters into the coloured water.  You can do a bunch at once. And they don’t need to sit in the water for more than a few seconds.

Experiment with the outer edges.

Versus the inside. Or the whole thing.

Squeeze out the excess dye with your hands.

I totally dyed my hand pink.

Spread out the filters to dry completely.

Mine took a few hours, less when I fully separated the layers and put them in a place with lots of air flow.

This is the full stack next day.

Now, in addition to the filters, you will need scissors, a stapler (with staples), and then some tape or wire (I have floral wire here).

Grab between 6 and 8 of the filters and stack them up.  Flatten them a bit with your hands.

Fold the filters in half, then half again so you have a little cone.

Take your scissors and scallop the rounded edge of the cone — don’t worry about perfection, it’s all good.

Now unfold the thing and ruffle it up a bit.  Pinch that spot at the very centre where you made your folds.

Flip the filters over and you can see what I mean by that pinch.

Staple over that pinched spot to hold things in place.

Now flip it back over and smooth it out a bit.

Pull up the edges of the topmost (innermost) filter and, working from the bottom, squish the filter in on itself, leaving a nice fluffy gathering on top.

Keep going with each successive layer.

Make sure to keep the top nice and fluffy, while still jamming the paper against itself.

Gather up the bottom layer and push it upwards, squeezing into the little handle you’ve created for yourself.

The paper will hold its shape for a short time, but you want to fix it more permanently.  You can use tape around the little nub here or floral wire, which is what I used.

I attached one flower to one end of the wire and another to the bottom.  What am I going to do with it?  I’m getting to that.

Because of the variation in the way I dyed the filters, you can see different colour gradations in the finished flowers.

On this one I put the darker filters in the middle.

This was the resulting bloom.

I used 8 filters per bloom and ended up with 18 flowers finished, which means I had 144 filters dyed.

When I was finished I gathered some of the blossoms that were tied together and I used an additional piece of floral wire to wind their stems together.

And it made two lovely little bouquets of 9 flowers each.

I don’t even want to talk about that horrible plaster job in the background.  The landlord took our chimney away and now I have no place to display my work.

So until I figure out how to compensate for my lack of a fireplace, I’ve put my pseudo peonies flanking my television.  Because I’m classy like that.

The Baseball Cake

Jealous?

It was Rusty’s birthday, and that man is the biggest Toronto Blue Jays fan that has ever existed.  I received this ridiculous cake pan for Christmas, which would supposedly create a cake in a cupcake shape, so we figured we’d experiment with Rusty’s baseball-themed birthday cake.

Now I want you to be prepared for the absolute awesomeness that is about to follow, and hold back your tears of joy when you see our massively amazing cake decorating skills. Just try to contain yourself. We are that good. Yes, it’s true. And that pan aside, we had some awesome tools to work with, like this nifty new whisk/spatula designed specifically for making batter. What could go wrong?

Because the Blue Jays’ colours are red, white, and blue, the Pie and I decided to make Rusty a red velvet cake, and we went with Bakerella’s recipe for the same, because it seemed to produce a rich red crumb (we later figured out that this was at the sacrifice of the chocolatey goodness for which red velvet is famous but it was still good nonetheless).

So, first we preheated the oven to 350°F and then buttered and floured our cake pan.

In one bowl, we mixed together 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, 2 cups sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1 measly tablespoon cocoa. If you want a more chocolatey-tasting cake (because it is a chocolate cake after all), then feel free to add more cocoa, and maybe some melted chocolate. Mmmm ….). Anyway, whisk that up and set it aside.

In another bowl plop 2 eggs.  Without their shells would be good.  They never really specify that in recipes, but you should always crack eggs before you add them to cake batter.  Just a fun fact for your information.

Use a nifty whisk to beat ’em up.

Add in as well 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil, 1 cup buttermilk, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 2 teaspoons vanilla, and 2oz red food colouring.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and whisk until well-combined. Holy cow is that ever pink.

Pour your batter into your prepared pans, scraping the sides of the bowl, and tap the filled pans on the counter to release any air bubbles.

Bake the cakes for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Ours took a little longer due to the construction of the pan. Remove them from the oven and let them sit for about ten minutes before emptying onto a wire rack to cool completely.

While that’s cooling, you can whip up your cream cheese icing. In the bowl of your electric mixer, beat an 8oz package of room temperature cream cheese with 1 cup room temperature butter and 1 teaspoon vanilla until smooth. Slowly beat in 6 cups icing sugar. Then take half of that icing out and set it aside.

To the remaining half, add blue food colouring until you achieve your desired colour.

So now we have blue icing to frost the “cupcake liner” half, and white for the top, to resemble a baseball.

With the design of this cake, you need to “glue” the two halves of the cake together (but you’d have to do that with two layers anyway).

The bottom half was so heavy and dense it started to crack under its own weight, so I patched it a bit.

Then I iced up the bottom. I tried to make it resemble the corrugations of a cupcake liner. You can see that I succeeded in a masterful fashion.

Then I did the top. I tried to smooth out some of the natural swirls in the structure of the cake to make it more round, like a ball. As you can see, the results were epic.

Then I put the pie to work with a tube of red gel piping to make baseball seams in the cake. Oh man, admire that steady hand.

Smooth, even stitches.

Crowing in glee at his own mad skills.

And our final product, a majestic confection which tasted great, despite not being a chocolate cake, a baseball, or a cupcake.  Rusty loved it.

Distractions: Easy Finger Paints

It’s Christmas Eve.  If you have small children, I’m sure your nerves are frayed with their over-excitement.  We’re having enough trouble dealing with just Rusty today, and he’s over thirty.

Why not whip up this quick distraction tool (from Easie Peasie, what a great name) for the young (and old) to keep them busy for a while.  It’s worth the mess, I think.

In a small saucepan, combine 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup corn starch, and 2 cups water.

Heat, whisking often, until the mixture starts to thicken.  It happens all at once, so make sure you’re paying attention.

BAM.

If you keep going it will turn into plastic, so make sure it’s still stir-able when you take it off the heat.

Remove from the heat and pour it into individual containers.

Use food colouring to create the desired colours.

Stir those colours in well.  Make sure you scrape the bottom and sides to get it all mixed in.

I went with the classic rainbow.

Keep the paints sealed and out of direct sunlight.  Give them a bit of a stir before using, because there will be a bit of a dry skin on top.

When I was young my dad refinished our back room, where the laundry machines were, and the door to the backyard.  While it was empty, my mother chucked in a huge roll of craft paper and a pile of finger paints and I would spend hours back there, making a mess.  I’m handing these (along with a roll of craft paper) over to the Incredibly Little Hulk and Il Principe when they get back from Kansas so I’m sure I will be soon seeing some very painty little boys.