ladysprite (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ladysprite) wrote2015-04-19 09:46 am
ladysprite) wrote2015-04-19 09:46 am
Entry tags:
Cookbook Project, Book #205
"Starbucks Passion for Coffee," Dave Olsen, John Phillip Carroll, and Lora Brody
Okay - I don't drink coffee, so this is kind of weird. Except it's not a book of coffee recipes, thankfully. It's about 40 pages about what coffee is and how to brew it and how apparently espresso is better than all other coffee, and then a whole lot of recipes for things that you can eat while drinking coffee. Because apparently there are restrictions, or something. I'm not sure whether the idea is that you can't, say, eat grilled cheese with coffee, or that pear-ginger muffins are only to be eaten with coffee; the book is unclear on that. (Though I will say that I had my recipe from this book with a mug of tea; hopefully the Starbucks police won't come down on me and revoke my License to Beverage.)
But the book was a gift from <lj user="hungrytiger">, whose family was debulking their own cookbook stock, and it is full of tasty-looking baked goods, and pretty pictures, and the recipes are actually pretty well written, so I figured I'd give it a try. There were a bunch of things that looked tasty enough, for generic muffins and coffee cakes, but the recipe that caught my eye was for Cinnamon Swirl Biscuits.
These looked like a cross between biscuits and cinnamon buns - take a super-rich buttermilk biscuit dough, roll it around a cinnamon filling, slice it, and bake it. Best of both worlds, right?
Sadly not. The biscuit dough was dry, and the cinnamon filling didn't have any butter or fat to hold it together so it just spilled out, and didn't integrate into the dough at all or melt and get gooey. They weren't *bad* - it's hard to be actively bad with baked goods and cinnamon and brown sugar - but they weren't particularly good, either. I kind of want to remake this, but with a richer biscuit dough and a better filling.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure whether this book will get another try. This was more of a recipe failure than an execution failure, and it makes me question the quality of the other recipes.
I'm really hoping that my next book here will be a winner; I seem to be having rather a streak of mediocrity.....
Okay - I don't drink coffee, so this is kind of weird. Except it's not a book of coffee recipes, thankfully. It's about 40 pages about what coffee is and how to brew it and how apparently espresso is better than all other coffee, and then a whole lot of recipes for things that you can eat while drinking coffee. Because apparently there are restrictions, or something. I'm not sure whether the idea is that you can't, say, eat grilled cheese with coffee, or that pear-ginger muffins are only to be eaten with coffee; the book is unclear on that. (Though I will say that I had my recipe from this book with a mug of tea; hopefully the Starbucks police won't come down on me and revoke my License to Beverage.)
But the book was a gift from <lj user="hungrytiger">, whose family was debulking their own cookbook stock, and it is full of tasty-looking baked goods, and pretty pictures, and the recipes are actually pretty well written, so I figured I'd give it a try. There were a bunch of things that looked tasty enough, for generic muffins and coffee cakes, but the recipe that caught my eye was for Cinnamon Swirl Biscuits.
These looked like a cross between biscuits and cinnamon buns - take a super-rich buttermilk biscuit dough, roll it around a cinnamon filling, slice it, and bake it. Best of both worlds, right?
Sadly not. The biscuit dough was dry, and the cinnamon filling didn't have any butter or fat to hold it together so it just spilled out, and didn't integrate into the dough at all or melt and get gooey. They weren't *bad* - it's hard to be actively bad with baked goods and cinnamon and brown sugar - but they weren't particularly good, either. I kind of want to remake this, but with a richer biscuit dough and a better filling.
Meanwhile, I'm not sure whether this book will get another try. This was more of a recipe failure than an execution failure, and it makes me question the quality of the other recipes.
I'm really hoping that my next book here will be a winner; I seem to be having rather a streak of mediocrity.....