In the aftermath of Valentine's Day only a few new items seemed to roll in last week, but I stopped in after a dentist appointment today and there were plenty of new and returning items to chuck into my basket. As spotted in the Pacific Northwest.
NEW:
I've got the oven preheating for Trader…
It's National Donut Day, I decided to whip up some baked donuts using Trader Joe's Ube Mochi Pancake and Waffle mix.
I had 1.5 cups of the mix left after making waffles, so I followed the recipe on the back of the box and put together the 1/2 c. water, 2 eggs and…
If You’ve Been Missing Rom-coms at the Movies, You’ve Got to Read Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date
ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley
The Wedding Date, Jasmine Guillory’s debut novel is absolutely delightful. Alexa and Drew meet cute and get stuck temporarily in a hotel elevator in San Francisco. Luckily, she’s armed with…
I make everything about food. So when I finished reading Jasmine Guillory's fantastic novel, The Wedding Date, one of the things I latched onto was the heroine's love for pink donuts with sprinkles. But these baked chocolate donuts (double chocolate even!) go above and beyond with not just a dip in pink glaze, but real…
"Two fingers," he'd say, holding two gnarled, deeply tanned digits up to his glass.
Reaching into the sideboard cabinet, he pulled out a half empty bottle. He poured two fingers worth of brown liquor into the rocks glass and I followed, holding the carton with two hands and topping the booze with at least two more fingers of eggnog. Some years it was Wild Turkey and others Crown Royal, but always whiskey with eggnog.
Like a lot of Japanese-American men of his generation, my grandpa wasn't a super talkative man, but he'd sit at the kitchen table and shoot the s**t over a glass of spiked eggnog, getting chattier as he got deeper into his cups. Even now, there's nothing like a whiff of whiskey and eggnog and nutmeg to put me right back at that table with him during the holidays.
Since I was a kid, I've loved donuts. Wednesday mornings on the way to school, my mom would stop at the donut shop in my home town. I'd hop out of the car and drop a couple of quarters into the newspaper machines for the LA Times and Examiner food sections and sometimes we'd get a dozen donuts in a pink box. Sugar-raised, glazed, chocolate-topped, a crumb cake (always the last one left in the box) and a plain cake for my grandpa. Other times, on weekends, we'd go to Dunkin Donuts and get a bunch of Munchkins in an orange handle box. The chocolate cake ones were my favorite.
Fast forward 15 years. The first time I had a malasada might have been at Komoda Store in Makawao, Maui. It was good, but just seemed like a donut. Later, on the Big Island we got some malasadas fresh from the fryer at Tex’s, and a new obsession was born. Rolled in sugar, these yeast-raised donuts are tender and sweet, and they’re as key to a visit to the Islands as plate lunch and good shave ice. Everyone always says Leonard's in Honolulu is the gold standard, I can't say, I haven't had theirs yet.
After seeing all these amazing baked doughnuts on various blogs, I finally caved and bought a doughnut pan. I've made 3 batches now -- caramel apple (minus the caramel topping), and 2 chocolate ones with different cocoa. But I'm just not sold. They're more like doughnut shaped muffins. Somehow I thought this pan was going to magically make doughnut shop-like doughnuts. I can just hear Alton Brown saying, "That pan's a unitasker. You know better. A real doughnut is fried at 365 degrees for 1 minute per side." And if he said that, he would be right. But that's not where this story ends.
The best malasadas on the Big Island ...
Tex Drive In -- Honoka'a, HI (only when they're hot)
Punalu'u Bakery -- Na'alehu, HI (made w/ their Hawaiian sweet bread dough)
L-R: traditional, liliko'i glazed, Bavarian cream filled
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