Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Recipe Tester

Recipes always look delicious in the pages of cookbooks, but how do they turn out in real life.  Heather investigates and reports back on the results.

PB&C Brownie Image

Recipe: PB &C Brownies.  These brownies have a layer of peanut butter in the middle and are topped off with dark chocolate ganache—a gourmet take on the classic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

From: Baking Unplugged by Nicole Rees (Recipe found on Page 133).

A Book to "Tap" into.

Recommended Read: Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher.

image of Tasting Beer cover.

When I was at a wine tasting recently, I noted that while some of the wine was good, I’d still rather have a beer. This elicited a laugh from the group of people I was with, though I was dead serious. Beer may be the most popular drink in the world, but it isn’t given the same respect as wine. It’s something you have with a burger and not something you savor. I think this is because when people think about beer, they associate it with a few large-scale breweries like Miller and Budweiser. Randy Mosher’s book could be called In Defense of Beer, because he shows that beer is capable as being just as complex and sophisticated as wine.