Pecan Pralines

Combined 2 recipes for this and am pretty happy, but I'll update as I fiddle.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup whole milk
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 2 tbspn molasses or corn syrup or cane syrup (I used cane syrup)
• 6-8tbspn (˜115g) salted butter
• 1.5 cups pralines, crushed

1. Mix the milk and sugars and syrup and very slowly bring them to a boil, stirring constantly.
2. Take them to the soft ball candy stage / 238F
3. Add the butter and stir while it bubbles like crazy.
4. Add the pecans.
5. Bring back to 238 / soft ball
6. Immediately spoon out onto parchment paper (˜2tbspn each) and let cool completely

Easy Peasy

Notes:

If you go to fast (like I did) and the milk proteins curdle out (like mine did) you can fix them by hitting the mix with a immersion blender once it starts to thicken.  Similarly if the caramel seperates after adding the butter you can do the same.  This is why I add the pecans last.

As soon as you remove the pot from the stove, start spooning out pralines.  I let it cool some, concerned about the volcanic heat, and by 1/2 way through spooning them out, my praline mix was hardening in the pot.

The mulk curdling otu annoyed me, and makes me thing that next time I might make my caramel with just water and then add cream with the butter.  But I have to think on this.

These were a big hit at T's work and tasted as good as the ones I buy in New Orleans, like molassesy, nutty fudge.

Lemon sugar cookies

Continuing with using up meyer lemons.
This is a basic change of a sugar cookie recipe for important lemony purposes.

Ingredients:

• 1.5 cups whole wheat pastry flour
• A little less than 0.5 tspn baking powder
• 2 tblspn meyer lemon zest (2 lemons)
• 0.5 cups sugar
• 0.5 cup / 125g salted butter
• 1 egg
• 0.25 cups lemon juice

1. Mix the flour, baking powder, and lemon zest together
2. Cream the butter and sugar
3. Add the egg and lemon juice to the butter and sugar and mix well
4. Add the flour mixture in and mix until just come together (do not over mix)
5. Chill at least 2 hours or overnight

You can either try rolling the dough out like pie dough to cut out shape, or just scoop out 1in balls (I did ther latter).

Bake at 375F for 10minutes then let cool before icing.  

I iced with left over lemon syrup from making candied lemon peel, but a classic icing of lemon juice mixed with powdered sugar would also work well.

Make ~20 cookies.

These were popular, but I felt like they had a little too much baking powder flavor.  I might try and replace the baking powder with a small ammount of baking soda next time because the lemon juice will activate it.  Also I could have probably baked them longer to get more of a crunchy cookie, instead of a soft more doughy cookie.

Candied Orange Peel

I think candying your own citrus peel is very worthwhile if you plan on making a recipe that uses it, because store bought peel is often stale and bitter, in part because they bulk it out with the albedo, the white fleshy part.

The recipe is pretty basic, but I just made some, and there are a few extra steps I take and a step I leave out, so it's worth noting my spin for future use.

Ingredients:

• 3 oranges
• 1 cup sugar

First you want to peel the oranges.  I discovered that a spiralizer I got for Christmas will make a very nice thin single rope of peel, so I used that.  But if you don't own one, just take a knife or potato peeler and carve strips off the oranges.  The key here is that they are thin and contain very little of the white.

Next you want to simmer them in a good ammount of water for 30minutes.

Then dump out and replace the water and simmer for another 30 minutes.

Here are my strips of peel simmering to remove bitterness

Next you are going to juice the oranges, then add water until you have 1 cup of juice+water.

Mix this with 1 cup sugar and bring to a boil

Add the drained peel and simmer over very low heat until the sugar solution has been condensed/absorbed (˜1hr), swirling or stirring every 10 minutes.

What the peel and syrup look like when the cooking is done.

Notice how condensed it is

Remove from the heat, let the pot cool, and place everythign in the fridge overnight.

Reheat the pot until the sugar solution is thin, and pull the peel out (I use chop sticks, but you can also poor it over a seive.

The peel should be left to cool on baking parchment.  At this point it can optionally be rolled in sugar.

The solution can be saved and used as a potently orange flavored simple syrup.

Finished, delicious and ready to decorate something.

To me, candied orange peel always looks like jewels