OT: Evil Spawn, was, Re: [Sca-cooks] Oops, I forgot...

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach AEllin Olafs dotter:
>That sounds like an excellent idea! Subtle carrot, without that 
>poisonous "I know you could do better if you only tried" speech... 
>because sometimes you can, and sometimes you can't, and when you 
>already are trying it's just discouraging...   but a reason to try 
>helps. Especially if it doesn't feel like a lecture...  Good luck. 
>Because you're right - it is important...

Unfortunately, my lectures all pretty much boil down to, "Sometimes 
it sucks to be from Krypton, Clark. People can't help having high 
expectations of you."

>Seems to me someone I know told me about a pistachio marzipan cake 
>in a modern cake cookbook. Cake Bible or some such, maybe?

Maybe. I'm a Paula Peck's Art of Fine Baking and Gisslen's 
Professional Baking man myself. I've been a pastry chef, but normally 
I don't have the patience for that type of precision. My most 
breath-taking stuff has always been interesting not for its 
complexity or elaborateness, but something that, while an everyday 
dessert in a two-square-mile area in southern France, seems hugely 
exotic to the inexperienced diner, and comfort food to the more 
experienced traveller. ;-)  As a result I find some of the stuff in 
The Cake Bible a bit... not exactly intimidating, but more a 
challenge I haven't found it necessary to face...

So, for example, while fooling around in the kitchen in La Colombe 
d'Or on a slow day, I sent out a comped dessert that I prepared on 
the spur of the moment. The waiter came in and said the customer said 
they were the best crepes he had ever eaten; he wanted to know what 
this dish was called. "Pancakes," I said. "Pancakes??? What kind of 
pancakes?" "Irish pancakes," I said. "Irish pancakes? What the &*%$#@ 
does that mean?" "It means they're pancakes of a type eaten in 
Ireland. Specifically, they're Shrove Tuesday Teatime Pancakes, if 
that clarifies anything for you..."

And this is just one of the 57 reasons I prefer the saute station to pastry.

But pistachio marzipan in the modern sense seems to come in two 
types: almond marzipan flavored and colored to look like pistachio 
goo, and marzipan actually made from pistachios. The medieval stuff 
would be the latter.

Adamantius