Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm • 
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What happens when you stuff sausage casings with cupcake-batter? That's what Stef from the Cupcake Project set out to discover. Short answer: sheer, heart-stopping deliciousness. Stef's produced a detailed HOWTO for making your own cupcakewurst. Suggested serving: "Serve warm on Long John doughnuts with raspberry sauce."
It took a lot of experimentation to conquer Cupcakewurst. I had hoped to be able to cook the Cupcakewurst entirely on the grill, but I found that the direct heat of the grill was more than the poor sausages could handle - they kept exploding and meeting their demise on the coals. I had the same problem in the oven: when I cooked the Cupcakewurst at the standard cupcake baking temperature of 350 F, they kept bursting open. I finally found the sweet spot of baking at 325 F and only filling the casings halfway. Even so, some of the casings still got small holes in them during baking. At 325 F, however, the cake cooked enough before the casings broke that only a small amount of batter oozed out through the holes. The small mess could easily be wiped up and the sausages were all usable.
This was my first time working with sausage casing and I found it to be really fun! It's a cross between a giant slippery noodle and a condom. It's stretchy and (comments above about it popping in the oven aside) fairly hard to accidentally break.
Cupcakewurst
(via Neatorama)
Cory Doctorow at 2:08 pm • •
Thrive's Nike has a recipe for making rainbow-striped jello Easter Eggs, using Kraft's "JELL-O JIGGLERS Egg Mold." She advises coating the mold with generous amounts of cooking spray, then using a syringe to add layers of color, chilling for 10-15 minutes between each layer.
I still remember fondly filling blown eggshells with liquid jello and letting them set in the fridge in an egg-carton, making "hard boiled eggs" that were filled with jello instead.
Rainbow Easter Eggs (via Neatorama)
Cory Doctorow at 5:59 am • •
The Apron Strings cooking blog continues its run of excellent ideas for making molded eggs by frying them inside vegetable cross-sections with this lovely recipe for onion-ring eggs: just half-cook rings of sliced onion, turn over, and crack in an egg. Add some water to the pan and cook covered over low heat. Be sure to click through for links to other variations, including some perfectly lovely flower-power eggs cooked in sectioned, floral-looking sweet peppers.
Onion Ring Sunny-side Up Eggs – Sauteed Onion as a Ring Mold for Eggs
(via Neatorama)
Cory Doctorow at 3:45 pm • •
Write-Light dug up this insane, multi-limbed lobster jello salad for the Vintage Ads LJ group. It originally appeared in the Davis Gelatine Recipe Book.
The Call of Cthulhull-o
Cory Doctorow at 6:59 am • •
Here's a recipe for using up your leftover Champagne: combine it with corn syrup and gelatin and make champagne marshmallows.
When you’re not feeling especially celebratory, make these with any sparkling wine or even beer (for a whole different animal!). If you’d rather just make a plain ol’ marshmallow, check out that recipe here. Leave the vanilla out to let the champagne flavor shine through, or use it to soften the champagne’s tartness. If you like the idea of “champagne and roses,” whip in a little rose flower water at the end of mixing, with or without the vanilla.
Champagne Marshmallows
(via Neatorama)
Cory Doctorow at 7:53 am • •
Before you put your bird in the oven, spare a moment for Tante Mary's "Just Put the Fucking Turkey in the Oven," a frank, 8-minute discussion of turkey, which includes the fact that making turkey taste good is less related to the bird, and more to the gravy, cranberries, and the all-important wine. "It's just a fucking bird. It doesn't taste very good." Sage advice.
Just Put the F*cking Turkey in the Oven
(via MeFi)
These look amazing. And you can make them with marshmallows, if you are so inclined. Happy Thanksgiving!
(Thank you, Rebecca Berkey) — Maggie
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Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am • •
Ommatidia's recipe for "Bolognese Machiavelli" is a delightfully savage bit of cookery:
1. Arrange to have garlic and onions cast into hot oil.
2. The carrot and celery you must divide against themselves. Ground beef, too, shall turn upon the burner; crush any coherent resistance with a spoon of wood. Sautee until no hint of blood remains to stain your hands.
3. Perhaps, in a dark place without witnesses, the tomato shall meet with the knife.
(via JWZ)
(Image: Niccolo Machiavelli, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from robert_scarth's photostream and P6123040, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from joyosity's photostream)
Cory Doctorow at 9:02 pm • •
Stephany Aulenback tried out a recipe for "Chemical Apple Pie," a beloved science experiment that uses cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) to trick the human tongue into tasting apples, though no apples are, in fact, used in the pie. The pie tasted pretty good, and Aulenback unearthed a lot of interesting history of the dish:
Further searching revealed that it is an even older recipe than that, dating back at least to the mid 1800s. Recipes for it have been found in the Confederate Receipt Book in 1863 and Mrs. B. C. Whiting's How We Cook In Los Angeles (1894) in which she referred to it as "California Pioneer Apple Pie, 1852" (if you follow that link, choose Mock Apple Pie from the menu on left). It's certainly easy to imagine that, historically, apples were difficult to come by out of season, at the end of a long journey across the prairies, or in an poorly supplied army camp. (As Mrs. Whiting is quoted saying, "The deception was most complete and readily accepted. Apples at this early date were a dollar a pound, and we young people all craved a piece of Mother's apple pie to appease our homesick feelings.") Presumably crackers—or the cracker-like foods of the time—kept better, and one sometimes needed to dream up new, more interesting ways to force oneself to ingest them yet again.
Apparently, the Nabisco company appropriated the recipe in the 1935 when they printed it on the boxes of their fancy new Ritz crackers; today, most people who are familiar with Mock Apple Pie associate it with Ritz. You can still find the recipe on their site, where they warn you to watch your serving size. Probably because of the calorie and fat content, not the muscle toxin.
(via MeFi)
