the abc murders
Cooking With Christie: Outtake
Though the glaze on the Molasses Tea Cakes was less than artful — I didn’t affect the taste!
Cooking With Christie: Outtake
Once again tried making a fermented hot sauce…..and failing.
Sigh.
Cooking With Christie: Chicken Tikka Masala
Inspiration: Once again, while baking bread, I listened with half an ear to Alton Brown and Simon Majumdar discussing Tikka Masala on Good Eats (the newer seasons). As my household enjoys tomatoes, chicken, spices, and rice, I decided to give this dish a go.
However, due to my stupid, stupid allergies, I couldn’t use Alton Brown’s recipe as it calls for coconut milk. (Though, I’ve gotta say Mr. Brown’s dish does look spectacular.)
Completely forgetting I own a massive British cookbook, I took to the interwebs to find a non-coconut milk based version of this recipe. (As I was unsure if I could swap moo juice for tree juice.) Whereupon I found one by Recipetineats, which looked promising.
Even better? It turned out great the very first time!
(Okay, this recipe is worth trying at least once, for the moment when you add the cream and butter to the tomatoey gravy. The swirls are absolutely magnificent!)
Helpful Hint From Me to You: As this dish calls for you to lightly char the meat before adding it to the sauce — I’d advise you NOT to use your brand new cream-colored castiron pan to complete the deed. Otherwise, you might end up making your pan appear well-loved/distressed long before you’d anticipated.
Christie: As this is now considered a quintessentially British dish….Depending on the circumstances, I think all of Christie’s detectives would have tried Tikka Masala at one point or another! (Well, in the books set after 1960, as that’s about the time when this dish was invented!)
My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2023
Cooking With Christie: CAKE!
This Week’s Recipe: Lemon Buttermilk Sheet Cake
Inspiration: Recently, one of my husband’s coworkers left for greener pastures, and he asked if I could bake one or two things for their going away party.
The theme of the gathering: When life gives you lemons…
Not one to say no when given a chance to bake, I hit my cookbook library and found (amongst others) America’s Test Kitchen’s recipe for a Lemon Buttermilk Sheet Cake! What first drew me in is that it’s glazed — not frosted. Since I needed to complete another four bakes that day, I found this an attractive feature, and it turned out beautifully on the very first try!
One of the keys to baking a cake from scratch, I learned from the Great British Bakeoff and repeated in the instructions — you need to make sure your butter, buttermilk, and eggs are all at room temperature when you start assembling the batter….then recall you’ve set them aside. Since it takes A WHILE for them to reach the requested ambient temp.
Ask me how I know.
Fortunately, since I was whipping up all kinds of other stuff, this step didn’t prove a problem….for once.
As for the required cake flour, don’t let that intimidate you — if you sift 1 cup of regular all-purpose flour twice, then take out 1 Tablespoon, you’ve got one cup of cake flour.
Helpful Hint: You don’t need all the glaze the recipe calls for. If you halve this portion of the recipe, you’ll still have more than enough to thoroughly coat your cake top!
Christie: Tangy, lemony, and not overly sweet. I can see Tuppence baking this cake as a treat for Tommy and their kids on a random Saturday in Spring!
(Someday I’ll manage to consistently put the right book in my baking photos….But today’s not that day.)
My 52 Weeks With Christie 
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