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drscottSaturday I bought a mixer (thought we had one, but no -- must have been Vancouver or Boston....) and some bowls and started baking cookies.
Apparently enough people had mentioned cooking and my recent lack of expression in that area to get me thinking about reviving my holiday fruit/spice cake tradition. It being after Christmas, I am a tad late. Too many Sunset magazines laying about nagging at me.
A real fruitcake is dense with either candied or dried fruits and nuts, with just a little cake as binder, and is wrapped in linen and drizzled with liqueur (Grand Marnier works well) for weeks before the holiday. I did that once, and I'll leave it to monks who value ritual and endless labor... the fruitcakes in the stores are generally bastardized versions with cheap ingredients and deserve their bad reputation.
So instead of fruitcake, I made spice cookies, which are a cross between fruitcakes and hermits. This year, trying to conform to the low-carb diet I'm on, I used sucralose instead of brown sugar, mixed in soy flour, and substituted flax seed oil for the usual butter. The results are still not ideal carbwise -- too much dried fruit for that -- but pretty good, and you can actually eat them without wrecking your diet. I'll try to bring some to ECR this week.
Apparently enough people had mentioned cooking and my recent lack of expression in that area to get me thinking about reviving my holiday fruit/spice cake tradition. It being after Christmas, I am a tad late. Too many Sunset magazines laying about nagging at me.
A real fruitcake is dense with either candied or dried fruits and nuts, with just a little cake as binder, and is wrapped in linen and drizzled with liqueur (Grand Marnier works well) for weeks before the holiday. I did that once, and I'll leave it to monks who value ritual and endless labor... the fruitcakes in the stores are generally bastardized versions with cheap ingredients and deserve their bad reputation.
So instead of fruitcake, I made spice cookies, which are a cross between fruitcakes and hermits. This year, trying to conform to the low-carb diet I'm on, I used sucralose instead of brown sugar, mixed in soy flour, and substituted flax seed oil for the usual butter. The results are still not ideal carbwise -- too much dried fruit for that -- but pretty good, and you can actually eat them without wrecking your diet. I'll try to bring some to ECR this week.
