[Sca-cooks] Hello! and questions...

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

Madhavi wrote:
>To The Queen's Taste
>To Make Green and Golden Apples
>I expected this recipe to make pretty round meatballs that I could endore
>and they would make a pretty conceit. I was even planning on getting little
>apple stems with leaves from a friend's apple trees and painting them gold
>to further the effect! But instead the pretty round meatballs I expected were
>ugly cracked misshapen things. And to get the endoring paste yellow enough
>and thick enough to stick sufficiently resulted in an overpowering
>saffron smell
>that everyone who ate it (I had 6 testers!) found unpleasant, but everyone
>liked the un-endored ones. Has anyone here made endored meatballs
>successfully? Should I try simmering the meatballs instead to prevent
>cracking? Would I be considered a bad apprentice for using yellow food
>coloring in the endoring paste to boost the yellow color with having to use
>so much saffron? Should the meatballs be wrapped in pastry first and then
>endored? Argh, that'd be a lot of work...

A. Sounds like you used too much saffron.

B. Reports indicate that lots of cooks have problems with the recipe.

C. A friend of mine just *won* our Kingdom Wooden Spoon competition
at our October Crown Tourney this weekend with a Pommes Dorees recipe
- the "theme" was "An English Dish".

She had many of the same problems you had. She ended up making very
tiny meatballs, maybe 1/2 or 3/4 of an inch in diameter, and some of
the yellow coating seemed to stick. Her coating wasn't cracked, but
they also weren't evenly coated. She served them in Sugar Plate
dishes that were shaped and painted to look like red apples.

She won, but not because her meatballs were "beautiful", although her
presentation was impressive. She won in part because she not only
presented the original recipe and her version, but she clearly
documented her entire process and all her decisions. Few of the other
10 entrants commented on what they did and why they made the
decisions they did. Most just copied a worked-out recipe off the
internet, often one that didn't follow the original very closely, and
that's all they presented, not explaining the differences.

I've never made "Golden Apples" so other than these pathetic
comments, i have no other help to offer :-(

I will ask my friend about her experience. I was not a judge at the
competition - when i got there, they had three already - but i was
invited to join them in tasting the food, and of course, i reviewed
the documentation. The contest was wonderful - 11 entries and a wide
range from fruit, to vegetables, to meats to sweets.

Anahita