Is the Cake Pop the New Cupcake?

Food fads are changing, and, for the sake of your sweet tooth, I suggest you keep up. For over a year, I’ve been boggled by the cupcake’s ability to reinvent itself. Stuffed, styled, and miniaturized, this children’s birthday party classic even scored its own television competition series.

I instantly turned my focus to the next step: what would ultimately give the cupcake the boot? When I first discovered brownie pops last summer, I thought that I had nailed it, but I had erred by overlooking the other birthday-party staple—cake. In part, I see this as the reason that the brownie pop tanked – that, and the fact that Starbucks didn’t endorse it.

The trouble with cake is that when you try to make it portable, the snack just gets complicated and irritating; however, once you put it on a stick, things get interesting.

Small bakeries (and home cooks with Internet access) are selling this new stick snack across the country, but nothing shocked this new wave like Starbucks did when they decided to dip their toe in the cake-pop-pool. For $1.50 you get about one compact bite of cake. The seemingly skewed price/cake ratio must be necessary in order to cover the costs of injecting as much butter as each morsel will allow.  A cross-sectional view of the pop shows the cake’s consistency, resembling that of raw dough, a recipe call with which I can’t argue.

Cake pops come in various flavors. Starbucks provides three: tiramisu, rocky road, and birthday cake. I’ve rarely seen a Starbucks have all three in stock, so I sampled the tiramisu and rocky road. Aside from the slight embellishments rested atop the frosting, the flavors were indistinguishable from one another. Regardless, the pops were pretty delicious and almost too rich to finish.  Almost.

Passover Stressing You Out?

From Exodus 12:14 and 15: “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD; throughout your generations, as statute forever, you shall keep it as a feast. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread. On the first day you shall remove leaven out of your houses, for if anyone eats what is leavened, from the first day until the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel.”

Well now that my brother lives in Israel, I rather not be cut off from the homeland, so I won’t be consuming any of the “5 forbidden grains”: wheat, barley, spelt, oats, rye—chometz, if you will. But what is this about an abandonment of rice, lentils, chickpeas, and now corn and thus corn starch and corn syrup? And don’t think that you can just drink away the pain of giving up your favorite corn-syrup treat, like chocolate Easter eggs in my case—ironic, I know—because all beer and most liquor are off limits as they were allowed to ferment, a luxury that the Ancient Egyptian fugitives did not have.

I think that limiting yourself to eating only foods that are not wheat, spelt, oats, barley, rye, legumes, corn, or rice is another way of agreeing to a seven-day starvation.

Exploring this further, I read that in the Middle Ages, rice, lentils, chickpeas, and fava beans were ground into flour, which put them in a state that could be confused with the true grains. That's unfortunate, but, as far as I know, the original trendsetters did not seem to have this problem. It seems unnecessary to make amendments to my Passover shopping list when the purpose of this holiday is for it to be a "memorial day," and not just something the French created with their mustard seed addition. Thank you France.

When deciding your own dietary restrictions this holiday season, I think it’s important to consider what Passover means to you. To me, it is a remembrance and honoring of the original miracle. So, bring on the hummus! 

Smažený sýr

The food stands in St. Wenceslas Square in Prague are anything but inviting. Questionable-looking people, most of whom, as I've researched, are actually Ukrainian, not Czech, set up shop in colorful stands lit up by marquees displaying the fair-like food options such as hotdogs and fries. 


I wouldn't have thought to approach the carnival madness if it weren't for a recommendation that I had gotten to try the smažený sýr, pronounced: ˈsmaʒɛniː ˈsiːr – helpful, I know. Smažený sýr literally translates to fried cheese. So now we have these Czech stands run by Ukrainian people serving American food in addition to this smažený sýr made of Edam, which is actually a Dutch cheese. Talk about an identity crisis. And to complicate matters further, the marquee was moving too quickly for me to read where I could pick up some of this famous sýr. I finally asked a woman working at one of the stands, who then proceeded to open a drawer, dig out a mysterious brown block with a pair of tongs, and drop it in the fryer. I assumed this meant I was buying it.

Picture a fried mozzarella stick in patty-form, which is then thrown on a bun with your choice of ketchup, mustard, or mayo served out of gigantic vats that you pump out yourself. Seeing as I was confronted with my greatest guilty pleasure, I of course covered that bad boy with mayonnaise before taking my first bite.

The cheese was perfect -- still melted from the fryer, causing the white cheese to ooze out of its crispy exterior. The mayo was surprisingly fantastic, adding even more creaminess and salt to the mix. I could have done without the bun. It was a little stale and attracting too much attention away from all the delicious fat that was going on inside of it. I peeled back the bread, picked out the cheese, and I was back in business.
I've officially added smažený sýr to my list of sickeningly scrumptious treats.

How to Vary your Strawberry

Perhaps the most delicious member of the rose family, strawberries have impressed me with their beauty and variety. With 600 different species of strawberry found today, it appears that we all have a lot of berry tasting to catch up on. Take a trip over to your local farmers market and hopefully you'll be able to witness some of the assorted colors and shapes. 

Typically, a strawberry's size is linked to the size of its water content: larger strawberries have a larger water content, while smaller ones have a more intense flavor. Beyond intensity, different species of strawberries actually do taste different. Learning more about the different types will help you to navigate through the strawberry fields forever.

Keep reading...

Beans, Beans, They're Good for Your...

Protein intake as well as your cholesterol level.  

Learning more about beans will help you add variety and nutrition to your diet. 

Keep reading...





 

Ten Foods You Can Now Dip in Chocolate

Strawberries are too cliché and pound cake is for amateurs. I’ve conducted tedious, pain-staking, chocolate-covered research, and, at the expense of my love-handles, landed upon ten new foods to get excited that you can now dip in chocolate.

Keep reading...

The Serrano Experience

“When you’re in Spain, you don't go to a bar because of the wine, you go because of the tapas." After Miguel Sanz spoke these delicious words, I averted my eyes away from my wine glass and focused on the four-course menu placed at my seat. Every course at the Consorcio Serrano ham dinner had one thing in common, and, on the evening of June 23, I didn’t go to La Fonda del Sol restaurant for tapas, I went for ham.

Jamón Serrano or “mountain ham” is a staple of Spanish cuisine. Served with olives and cheese or used to flavor your favorite recipe, Serrano ham can easily be mistaken for Italian prosciutto by the novice eye.

One of the main differences between Serrano and prosciutto is that Serrano is hung and cured for a year or longer, while prosciutto is cured for only a few months inside a covering of lard, giving prosciutto a higher humidity content and Serrano a deeper flavor. Serrano's lower fat content and stronger bite also add to its appeal.

As guests arrived at the Serrano dinner, Master Carver Ricardo Garrido Robles from Spain performed a ham carving demonstration, placing the finished slices of delicate, red meat on a serving plate. After reviewing my failed attempts at picking up the ham with the provided skewers, the Master Carver told me that Spaniards eat the ham with their hands anyway.

The first course was composed of raw sea scallops that were hidden under two layers of Serrano, served with a side of horseradish. 

In this course, the chef did not put the ham on the plate with the intention of it being eaten, but rather it’s purpose was to cure the scallops.

 A softer flavor of Serrano was captured in the scallop, slowly introducing our palates to the strong ham flavor.

The scallops were followed by three more appetizers: 

oysters topped with Serrano jelly,

black mission fig with Serrano and montcabrer, 

and a tortilla Espanola with a ham aioli (not pictured). My favorite was the fig. Evidently, fig season had just started, which was made clear once I bit into the juicy, mildly sweet fruit. The light sugar from the fig helped to moderate and balance the sharp bite from the ham and the salt of the cheese.

The main course was a poached halibut, accompanied with Serrano ham and a slice of melon that must have been soaked in a spicy marinade of some sort -- a heat that Master Carver Robles and Miguel Sanz later admitted was not characteristic of authentic Spanish cuisine -- but it was an interesting touch for a night like this.

The most unique meal of the night was dessert: a tomato sorbet with arugula, roncal, and candied ham.

As we sat around the table, Sanz explained how one of the most beautiful aspects of Spain is how, compared to America where people will sit down for a meal and talk of other things, in Spain a group of people will sit down for a meal and then talk about that meal for the entire extent of it's consumption. And that's what we did -- talked about food for 3-hours.

Now, that's a culture we should all strive to be more like.

How to Preserve Excess Fruit

Summer is a time when stocking up on fresh fruit seems like a great idea... until the moment you realize that half the fruit you bought had to be tossed and your refrigerator is left with a funky smell. 

Right as your fruit starts to lose its firm ripeness, it should be eaten or cooked immediately. If you choose to cook it, there are several different techniques that will help to expand the edible lifespan of your fruit.

Click here to read my article on goodbite.com about things you can do to get use out of your leftover fruit.

Foods that Take Longer to Eat

For most of my countless hours spent snacking, I’m not actually hungry, I’m just eating. Can you relate?

This wonderful phenomenon that some people naively misconstrue as a “problem” helps me to relax right before I begin to stress over the realization that every component of my pantry now lies in my stomach.

Does this mean we should stop snacking? Blasphemy! Let’s not be overdramatic. I believe the best course of action is to simply choose foods that take longer to eat. 

Read my tips on foods that take longer to eat on goodbite