"Besides the pope and the queen of Belgium," he wrote to us, "do you recognize someone else in the photo?"
Yup. That's our friend holding the candle!
I'm not jealous or anything.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
I think I'm called to be a seminarian
I have a friend who's a seminarian in Rome, and now and then I hear about the cool stuff he gets to see and do there. Today he emailed everybody with a link to this news photo.
"Besides the pope and the queen of Belgium," he wrote to us, "do you recognize someone else in the photo?"
Yup. That's our friend holding the candle!
I'm not jealous or anything.
"Besides the pope and the queen of Belgium," he wrote to us, "do you recognize someone else in the photo?"
Yup. That's our friend holding the candle!
I'm not jealous or anything.
Recipe for candy corn cookies
I've had two requests, so here's the recipe for the Candy Corn Cookies I just made. :)
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Also:
3/4 tsp orange extract
About 1/4 tsp orange icing color (also called paste food color)
1 square (1 oz) unsweetened chocolate
In a medium bowl, beat butter and sugar together till fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat till just combined. Slowly add flour, baking powder, and salt until combined. Divide the dough into three more-or-less equal portions.
Line a 9x5x3-inch loaf pan with waxed paper, leaving long edges so it can easily be folded over later. Cutting out the corners will make it a bit easier to line the pan.
To one portion of dough, add icing color until it's as orange as you want it. Add orange extract until it tastes as orange as you want it. Can you tell I didn't measure this part very precisely? :)
When I made this recipe I added 1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts to the orange dough, but now I think we should leave that out-- it detracts from the smooth candy corn effect.
Melt the square of unsweetened chocolate and mix it into another portion of dough.
Spoon the chocolate dough into the lined loaf pan, and spread it out with a spoon until it's a fairly even layer. (It's a bit tricky because the wax paper slides around, but you'll get there.)
Smooth the orange dough on top of the chocolate dough, and then smooth the vanilla dough on top of that. Fold over the wax paper and chill the dough for at least an hour. Longer is better-- makes the dough firmer and easier to slice.
Lift the waxed paper to remove the dough from the pan. Cut the dough crosswise in pieces about 1/4 to 1/8 inch thick. It's nice if all the cookies on one sheet are about the same thickness, so they'll cook at the same rate.
Cut each rectangular piece into triangles. See the post below for pictures of all this. It's easiest to cut the dough on wax paper or parchment paper.
Lay the triangles on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
Bake at 350 °F for about nine minutes. Bake time depends on how thick the cookies are, so if I were you I'd start watching carefully after eight minutes and take the cookies out as soon as there's any sign of edges turning brown.
It's best to let the cookies cool and harden before transferring them anywhere.
Ta-daaa!
I adapted this recipe from one that my mom cut from a magazine eighteen years ago. Here's a picture of the original recipe, and these are the changes you want to make for the original Neapolitan cookies.
Instead of orange color and extract, add five drops of liquid red food coloring and 1/2 tsp almond extract to that portion of dough. It'll taste vaguely like strawberry.
Add 1/2 cups finely chopped walnuts to the vanilla dough.
The chocolate dough is the same.
Layer the three doughs in a loaf pan with vanilla in the middle. Chill to firm. Then cut the dough in half lengthwise so you have two long rectangular blocks of dough. Cut each block crosswise into pieces 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Bake at 350 °F for about ten minutes. These cookies are rectangles instead of triangles.
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Also:
3/4 tsp orange extract
About 1/4 tsp orange icing color (also called paste food color)
1 square (1 oz) unsweetened chocolate
In a medium bowl, beat butter and sugar together till fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and beat till just combined. Slowly add flour, baking powder, and salt until combined. Divide the dough into three more-or-less equal portions.
Line a 9x5x3-inch loaf pan with waxed paper, leaving long edges so it can easily be folded over later. Cutting out the corners will make it a bit easier to line the pan.
To one portion of dough, add icing color until it's as orange as you want it. Add orange extract until it tastes as orange as you want it. Can you tell I didn't measure this part very precisely? :)
When I made this recipe I added 1/2 cup finely chopped walnuts to the orange dough, but now I think we should leave that out-- it detracts from the smooth candy corn effect.
Melt the square of unsweetened chocolate and mix it into another portion of dough.
Spoon the chocolate dough into the lined loaf pan, and spread it out with a spoon until it's a fairly even layer. (It's a bit tricky because the wax paper slides around, but you'll get there.)
Smooth the orange dough on top of the chocolate dough, and then smooth the vanilla dough on top of that. Fold over the wax paper and chill the dough for at least an hour. Longer is better-- makes the dough firmer and easier to slice.
Lift the waxed paper to remove the dough from the pan. Cut the dough crosswise in pieces about 1/4 to 1/8 inch thick. It's nice if all the cookies on one sheet are about the same thickness, so they'll cook at the same rate.
Cut each rectangular piece into triangles. See the post below for pictures of all this. It's easiest to cut the dough on wax paper or parchment paper.
Lay the triangles on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
Bake at 350 °F for about nine minutes. Bake time depends on how thick the cookies are, so if I were you I'd start watching carefully after eight minutes and take the cookies out as soon as there's any sign of edges turning brown.
It's best to let the cookies cool and harden before transferring them anywhere.
Ta-daaa!
I adapted this recipe from one that my mom cut from a magazine eighteen years ago. Here's a picture of the original recipe, and these are the changes you want to make for the original Neapolitan cookies.Instead of orange color and extract, add five drops of liquid red food coloring and 1/2 tsp almond extract to that portion of dough. It'll taste vaguely like strawberry.
Add 1/2 cups finely chopped walnuts to the vanilla dough.
The chocolate dough is the same.
Layer the three doughs in a loaf pan with vanilla in the middle. Chill to firm. Then cut the dough in half lengthwise so you have two long rectangular blocks of dough. Cut each block crosswise into pieces 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Bake at 350 °F for about ten minutes. These cookies are rectangles instead of triangles.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Candy corn cookies
It's October and Halloween is coming up. Yes, All Hallows Eve, so named because it is the day before All Saints' Day. And you know what that means...CATHOLIC DESSERT TIME!
Yes! It has been too long (like, two whole weeks)! So here's what I made yesterday. I'll type up the recipe if anyone wants it; otherwise we'll just have pictures which you can always click for bigger versions. (UPDATE: recipe is here.)
First I assembled an intriguing cast of characters. (Ignore the cherry tomatoes. An unrelated recipe.)
Now just pause for a moment and meditate on how many of life's blessings begin with butter and sugar creamed together.
Adding some other stuff to the butter/sugar mix. Isn't it convenient that eggs are individually date-stamped now? All these great innovations; young people today don't appreciate it.
I added egg, flour, vanilla, salt, and baking powder to the dough.
I then divided it into three portions. One portion will be left plain.
Another gets put back into the mixer. I threw in some chopped walnuts.
Now for the most fun ingredient: food coloring. This is concentrated paste instead of liquid, so you can get intense color without watering down your recipe.
You can buy it at cake stores, arts and crafts stores, places like that. I got mine in orange. Looks like this.
I just used a toothpick to slap some on the dough.
And mixed it in.
And to get really fancy, orange extract. Not too much; just enough to make the eater wonder, "Does this orange part of the cookie actually taste orange, or am I imagining it?"
Mmmm... nice orange walnut dough.
Moving on now to CHOCOLATE. I switched to the last third of dough, melted a square of unsweetened chocolate, and mixed it in. Most rewarding.
The chocolate dough tasted so good that I was briefly tempted to just make a bunch of chocolately chocolate cookies.
But no, I'll stick to my plan. Here are my three kinds of dough. They make a lovely tableau. See where I'm going with this now?
Here's a pan for baking small loves of bread. I lined it with wax paper, cutting out the corners for convenience.
Then I threw the chocolate dough in there...
And spread it out.
The spreading out was hard, actually. It's much easier if you spoon out the dough in pieces, like I'm doing with the orange dough to spread it on top of the chocolate.
Vanilla dough goes on last.
Then fold over the wax paper and you have a lovely and most promising little package.
I chilled it for an hour or two in the fridge, then got it out along with some parchment paper and cookie sheets.
Here's my dough all wrapped up.
Let's unwrap it and cut a slice!
Now what can we do with this?
Slice it up into triangles, like the bodies of the apostles at the Last Supper! (Inside joke for blog readers.)
Repeat many times and lay out on cookie sheets.
Now you see where I was going with it. Little candy corn cookies, not much bigger than real candy corn. Behold the cuteness!
And here's the same sheet after baking for eight minutes.
Now that is adorable.
I turned over a couple so you could see the underside.
To concentrate the cuteness I stacked them in a cupcake box.
Closeup for quality inspection.
Oh yes. This is why I never lose any weight. CANDY CORN COOKIES!
Sea urchins past expiration date
So at the lab I'm still working on a project that involves injecting a different species of sea urchin eggs than we normally use. A species called arbacia punctulata is collected from the Atlantic Ocean by the Duke marine lab, and then FedExed to us in California by overnight delivery.
We were expecting a shipment this past Wednesday, but it didn't arrive. We called all over campus and finally discovered that the cooler of thirty sea urchins had never been delivered to Caltech at all, but went to some health clinic instead, where a not-very-attentive employee signed for it.
FedEx said they'd collect the cooler from the health center and deliver it to us on Thursday, but for some reason that didn't happen. The cooler finally showed up on Friday, and by then... brace yourself... the urchins were all dead. They get shipped in little Tupperware containers full of seawater, but that's only good for a while before their oxygen is depleted. So sad to get a bunch of dead urchins when I was supposed to have been the one to kill them!
(Sea urchins don't have brains, nor even a few brain cells, so I'm not going to guilt myself out about killing them even if they do continue to wave their spines around for some minutes after being cut open...)
We'll file a claim for the urchins. They were $120 plus the pricey overnight shipping. What I want to know now is, did the guy who signed for the package at the health center actually open the cooler and check the contents? And if so, what did his face look like when he discovered a bunch of live sea urchins inside?
Maybe one day I'll ship one of you a bunch of sea urchins, just to make your day a little more surreal. I'll then deny all knowledge of it and you'll wonder forever who the sender was and what message was being communicated. :)
We were expecting a shipment this past Wednesday, but it didn't arrive. We called all over campus and finally discovered that the cooler of thirty sea urchins had never been delivered to Caltech at all, but went to some health clinic instead, where a not-very-attentive employee signed for it.
FedEx said they'd collect the cooler from the health center and deliver it to us on Thursday, but for some reason that didn't happen. The cooler finally showed up on Friday, and by then... brace yourself... the urchins were all dead. They get shipped in little Tupperware containers full of seawater, but that's only good for a while before their oxygen is depleted. So sad to get a bunch of dead urchins when I was supposed to have been the one to kill them!
(Sea urchins don't have brains, nor even a few brain cells, so I'm not going to guilt myself out about killing them even if they do continue to wave their spines around for some minutes after being cut open...)
We'll file a claim for the urchins. They were $120 plus the pricey overnight shipping. What I want to know now is, did the guy who signed for the package at the health center actually open the cooler and check the contents? And if so, what did his face look like when he discovered a bunch of live sea urchins inside?
Maybe one day I'll ship one of you a bunch of sea urchins, just to make your day a little more surreal. I'll then deny all knowledge of it and you'll wonder forever who the sender was and what message was being communicated. :)
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California
Santa Paula is about an hour and a half from where I live, and yesterday I drove on up, just because I could. (And because Thomas Aquinas College seemed like a cool place and I wanted to see it for myself.) I planned to arrive in plenty of time for the 7:30 AM Mass.
I should have left earlier. I arrived right at 7:30 AM and I wasn't sure whether I was late for Mass or not. This is the humble little entrance to the chapel:
And these are the imposing front doors.
Over them a Latin inscription in gold reads, "This is the house of God and the gate of Heaven-- so don't come waltzing in here late!"
I mustered my courage and pushed one of the heavy doors open. Mass hadn't started yet, thank goodness. :)
It was a TLM, very lovely. Here's a shot of the chapel that I took from the choir loft after Mass. You can see the coat of arms of Benedict XVI on the floor, and John Paul II's arms were there too. I thought that was a nice touch.
Afterward I walked around the campus. Didn't take long; it's a tiny college.
One thing I noticed was that no matter where I was, no matter what perspective I was looking from,
the chapel was the tallest and most noticeable feature of the scene.
Like in a medieval town.
Imagine the effect on the psyche of the people when their church is always visible, looming over everything else. And everyone goes to the same church.
When the sun had risen a bit and I returned to my car, I saw that it was the only car in the lot that had shade, because the shadow of the bell tower was falling on it. Turning around, I saw the sun perfectly eclipsed, and thought it made a pretty cool photograph.
Thus endeth my photo walking tour. :)
I should have left earlier. I arrived right at 7:30 AM and I wasn't sure whether I was late for Mass or not. This is the humble little entrance to the chapel:
And these are the imposing front doors.
Over them a Latin inscription in gold reads, "This is the house of God and the gate of Heaven-- so don't come waltzing in here late!"
I mustered my courage and pushed one of the heavy doors open. Mass hadn't started yet, thank goodness. :)
It was a TLM, very lovely. Here's a shot of the chapel that I took from the choir loft after Mass. You can see the coat of arms of Benedict XVI on the floor, and John Paul II's arms were there too. I thought that was a nice touch.
Afterward I walked around the campus. Didn't take long; it's a tiny college.
One thing I noticed was that no matter where I was, no matter what perspective I was looking from,
the chapel was the tallest and most noticeable feature of the scene.
Like in a medieval town.
Imagine the effect on the psyche of the people when their church is always visible, looming over everything else. And everyone goes to the same church.
When the sun had risen a bit and I returned to my car, I saw that it was the only car in the lot that had shade, because the shadow of the bell tower was falling on it. Turning around, I saw the sun perfectly eclipsed, and thought it made a pretty cool photograph.
Thus endeth my photo walking tour. :)
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