I know you’re dying to get your hands on my icing recipe
Maybe, if you send me a really nice e-mail, I’ll send it to you. Because this icing is amazing; nothing like you’ve ever had before. Just ask my brother. The premise of Jessica Seinfeld’s new cookbook, Deceptively Delicious to to hide nutritious foods in your kid’s favorite foods. This week, I followed her recipe for chocolate dipping sauce. The ingredients? (To Jessica’s dip, not my icing.) Pureed avocados and carrots, cocoa powder and powdered sugar. I’m not kidding. The result? Deceptively Dangerous. Dangerous, because I couldn’t stop eating the stuff. Luckily for me, the kids beat me to it and eliminated all of the temptation before it could do much damage to my waist line.
And of course there are other books that offer the same strategies, and poor Jessica is left defending herself by saying “I’m only doing what Grandmother’s have already been doing for generations,” I can vouch for her. I used to do this myself.
At the tender age of 12, I was alone with a Betty Crocker cookbook, probably now vintage, on my Mom and Dad’s Wedding Anniversary. June 22. Spice cake it would be - from scratch. Remember that word? I was baking a cake from scratch. Once the cake was baking, I scanned the Betty’s index for icing — looking for the perfect topping.
This one looked good: Powdered sugar, milk, cream of tartar… Hmmm. What is cream of tartar? Could it be? No — that would be impossible. But yet, I had seen my Mom do miracles with a bottle of ketchup and flour and chicken fat; maybe tartar sauce it is. Tartar sauce is creamy, so of course — cream of tartar is just a fancy way of saying tartar sauce.
I mixed it in, and it went well, but the chunks of pickle on top of the cake looked a little… off. So, I asked my little brother to do a taste test. He licked the bowl, and his face said it all. If you can imagine that awful taste the poor kid had to endure. But, he said, “It’s pretty good.”
My life as a chef has evolved very much since those days, but I highly recommend you use a good book, like Deceptively Delicious, if you want to start substituting ingredients. Read more at PBN’s blog blast.
Related posts:
To answer your question on the left - yes, get them a wii..although, not entirely unselfishly, ’cause then we can come over and play too! Do they have wii yoga?!
LOL! That sounds nasty - the one with tartar sauce, that is.
[...] I Know You’re Dying to Get Your Hands on My Icing Recipe [...]
oh so funny! What did your parents say?
Found you via the blast. My entry is here:
http://mamaknj.blogspot.com/2007/10/lay-off-jessica-people.html
tartar sauce! funny! the first time I was a tennager making hamburger helper I looked at the directions that said “brown the ground beef” I looked at the meat. “Looks pretty brown to me,” I thought, and kept cooking. These were the days when you cooked it in the oven. The layer of grease on top of the dish was pretty astounding.
My sister and I made brownies once without supervision. She read the box “Mix by hand” So that’s what we were doing 5 minutes later when mom came in to find us. Very little of that brownie mix actually made it to the pan to be cooked that day
Oh my. Tartar sauce. Fantastic. And I absolutely love that your brother said “It’s pretty good.”
It reminds me a bit of when I mixed up Baking Soda and Baking Powder. Who knew the difference could be so great?
P.S. I was born on your parent’s anniversary!
I am Susie’s brother, and I vaguely remember the tartar sauce icing recipe. Not sure why I said it tasted good though, I must have wanted something else from her. She did make a really good potatoe soup.
[...] was a thrill to watch him fly across that field, uninhibited. It was his last game, and my brother and Father were there, doing their duty to share all the glory and pat him on the back. And every [...]