We love cake but it doesn’t love us. With a whole cake in front of us, we can’t resist slicing another “little piece”…then another. That’s why we’ve looked for ways to serve smaller portions.
Cakelet or mini-cake pans have saved the day. Instead of baking a standard cake, we make cakelets.
In addition to looking oh-so-charming, these mini cakes create a sense of portion control. We can restrain ourselves to two or three cakelets at a time, saving calories, carbs and fat.
They’re also easy to make: Just pour cake batter into a pan. No frosting required; although you can serve optional whipped cream or dessert sauce.
This fall-themed baking pan from Williams-Sonoma creates acorn, pumpkin, pine cone and walnut cakelets.
Willliams-Sonoma also has a pumpkin and maple leaf whoopie pie pan.
September 30, 2010 at 8:36 am
· Filed under Entertaining
Rolls of colorful cloth napkins and place-
mats create instant table décor. Photo
courtesy MYdrap.
Here’s something new: Elegant cloth cocktail napkins and dinner napkins, placemats and table runners that are manufactured in a roll and separated like paper towels. When you need to set the table, tear off what you need. No one but you will know that the table linens came on a roll.
The elegant cloth napkins and placemats, made of cotton or linen, provide fashionable table-setting options: an instant fine-dining experience. The rolls are easy to store.
MYdrap is the first single-use napkin and placemat made of cloth (a choice of 100% cotton or linen). While the concept was developed for the hospitality industry—one-time-use, recyclable place settings that save on laundry bills—you don’t have to throw them away after dinner. They can be washed and re-used up to five times (some ironing is needed).
Why not just buy permanent cloth napkins and placemats?
1. Variety is the spice of life. You can switch and combine colors with ease, to match different sets of dishes, seasons or holidays (there are 14 colors in cotton and 7 colors in linen). We don’t need red and green table linens year-round; MYdrap is a relatively inexpensive way to set a holiday table. The same goes special events like baby showers: Use pink and blue napkins and mats.
2. No fuss. For people who like table linens but not washing and ironing them, they’re a boon.
MYdrap is available in the U.S. at Bloomingdale’s, and online at CasaMyDrap.com. There are 50 napkins per roll. The cost per standard dinner napkin is 60 cents.
September 30, 2010 at 7:45 am
· Filed under Tip Of The Day
What’s mise en place (MEEZ on PLAHS)?
It’s French for “everything in its place,” and it’s how cooks are trained from the outset to prepare recipes.
It simply means that before starting to cook or bake, everything needed to prepare the recipe is gathered, pre-prepped (chopping onions or measuring flour, for example) and set on the counter in easy reach. Only then is a cook ready to begin.
It’s surprising how many home cooks don’t follow this simple system. If you’ve found yourself looking for the lemon to zest, stopping to hunt for a kitchen tool or realizing that you don’t have enough butter, you’ll find that cooking is more efficient and unharried when you put mis en place in place.
Today is National Coffee Day, but where would we be any day without coffee filters?
Before 1908, coffee was a gritty affair. The percolators of the time tended to over-brew the coffee, making it too bitter. Espresso machines left grounds in the cup. Reusable linen bag filters were an option, but who wanted to empty and clean them?
Housewife Melitta Bentz (1873-1950) of Dresden, Germany sought a solution.
In 1908, Mrs. Bentz tested different ways to create a permeable barrier between the grounds and the brewed coffee. She hit pay dirt when testing blotting paper from the notebook of her older son (in those pre-ball point, pre-felt tip days, people wrote with pen and ink, and used the paper to blot up the ink spills).
She then she drilled holes in the bottom of a small brass pot, inserted the blotting paper over the holes, added ground coffee and poured hot water over it. The coffee dripped through, flavorful and groundless!
Mrs. Bentz tweaked the product and received a patent in 1912 for “a coffee filter with a curved and indented bottom and with slanting extraction holes,” to be used in combination with “filtration paper.” It was a hit. Today the company, run by Melitta’s grandchildren, has a workforce of some 3,800 people in 50 countries. In the U.S. alone, it sold $100 million worth of filters in 2009.
You can see the original device here. It doesn’t look like today’s sleek plastic cone and cone-shaped filter, (shown in the photo), but it did the trick.
