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Just Desserts
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Whether you've got a sweet tooth for days or just want a little somethin' somethin', this is the place to find new favorites and discuss your standbys.

Answers
  • So where can I get me some Schweddy Balls?
    Finn3goof_small

    It's at the Greenwood Market so I guess Town and Country markets carry it. Includes Greenwood Market, Central Market, Ballard Market et al. Tried it last night. S'ok. Not a big fan of malt balls and there are lot of them.

  • Best goods for a bake sale?
    Dscn0421_small

    Lemon bars are an excellent bake sale item. They're delicious, they're easy to eat without crumbling horribly, and they're unusual enough that most people don't make them at home and haven't had one in a while.

    Peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies are another favorite, but I don't know if you'll be allowed to bring/sell items with nuts in them. People go crazy for peanut butter and chocolate together. The finished cookies are pretty, too. If peanut butter isn't an issue, here's my recipe: 1 cup sugar, 1 cup brown sugar, 1 cup peanut butter, 2 eggs, 3 cups flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1 tsp baking powder, a bag of Hershey's chocolate kisses. Mix up your dough and drop it onto an ungreased cookie sheet in spoon sized portions. Cook at 375 F (for some reason I don't have the bake time on my recipe card). Once the cookies are done, quickly push an unwrapped kiss in the center of each, pressing down slightly.

    My mom has a pretty awesome recipe for miniature cheesecakes (you bake them in cupcake/muffin tins). They are amazingly easy to make and very very good, although you can't store them for long periods of time without refrigeration. Here's the recipe if you're interested: 3 8oz. packages cream cheese, 3 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1 box vanilla wafers. Soften the cream cheese and then mix all ingredients together (except the Nilla Wafers) until smooth. Put liners in cupcake tins and place a Nilla Wafer on the bottom of each liner, flat side down. Pour in the batter and cook at 325 F for about 20 minutes (cheesecakes will be done when they stop jiggling when the pan is tilted). I usually top the finished cheesecakes with berries of some kind, but you can also use various canned pie fillings. People are always impressed by this dessert.

    Banana bread and zucchini bread are also good options and are nice because they're a little less labor intensive. My zucchini bread recipe makes a deliciously moist bread, which I think is due to the crushed pineapple. Here's that one: 3 eggs, 1 cup oil, 2 cups sugar, 2 tsp. vanilla, 2 cups grated zucchini, 1 8 oz. can crushed pineapple with juice, 3 cups flour, 2 tsp. baking soda, 1 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp. baking powder, 1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, 3/4 tsp. nutmeg, 1 cup chopped nuts (I usually use walnuts). Mix thoroughly and bake in a loaf pan at 350 F for about 1 hour.

    Pricing is a little bit tricky- it's been a while since I was involved in a bake sale. I know I have done .75 for cookies in the past, and I definitely think that you can go up in price for more unusual goods- People would probably pay at least $2.00 for a cheesecake with a topping. You might want to think about doing combo pricing- 3 cookies for 2 dollars, for example- and letting people mix and match. With the recent rise of cupcakes as a trendy dessert, you can probably get away with selling them for a few bucks a pop, just like the cupcake bakeries do.

  • Where can I get a tasty sheet cake?
    N1462072360_2869_small

    Morphey's Cakes
    110 Denny Way, Seattle, WA 98109
    206-283-8557

    I used to work near this place and once a month got a cake for office birthdays. Every cake was delicious. Highly recommended.

    http://www.morfeyscake.com/home.html

  • Oh, my god. ls that a Crunchie in your avatar???
    Candy_porn

    Yeah, Crunchies are the shit. I spent part of my childhood in England and developed a deep and abiding love for the Crunchie. One time I found them at a Thriftway store on Bainbridge Island; they were there for about two weeks (for 99 cents, no less!) and just as suddenly disappeared.

  • Does Gelato really have half the fat?
    Avatar_default

    I'm just adding this as a side note, since Colin's answer was pretty thorough: If you're trying to prevent yourself from GETTING fat, ice cream is a better option for two reasons:

    Bite for (Full Tilt Quality) bite, ice cream is more filling: when you take out the delicious fat, you have more sugar per bite bound to not much but a tiny bit of protein and fat. Sugar is not as satiating, and not just because of the calorie count--calorie for calorie, fat fills you up faster while not making your blood sugar spike the way sugar does.

    More critically, FAT isn't what makes us fat. SUGAR is. A slab of meat will very efficiently convert to glycogen and store until we need it as glucose. Sugar, though, only has a portion of it stored as glycogen, and the rest the liver processes and stores as fat (fruit juice is even worse than plain table sugar: high fructose contents=high obesity, hence breast fed babies and milk fed being generally alright while soy fed babies--because they have to add corn syrup solids to formula to make it even partly digest--tend to become obese unless they fail to thrive at all). Sugar's real evil in making us fat is in making us insulin resistant (again, fructose is that real culprit). The higher the fructose proportion of a sweetener--agave is actually worse than HFCS!--the more it will make you insulin resistant, first (which is why it takes a long time to detect) in your MUSCLE tissue... then in all the ways that make us DIAGNOSED as being diabetic. When your muscle tissue is insulin resistant, which happens when sugars, fructose in particular, is consumed regularly, you get fatty stores in your arms, thighs, all those places that are extremely hard to work off the extra... and while fructose doesn't make your blood sugar spike (so it's low on a glycemic index but turns out that was faulty science, whoops), it makes you store fat, which in humans is not as delicious as in ice cream. Because the pancreas only responds to the GLUCOSE, we don't recognize that we're developing diabetes when sitting on our tushes drinking juice. The more sugar is BOUND to fiber (whole fruits!) and even to fat, the better the food IS, the slower it is to be converted to fat, the fuller you feel, and the more time you have to run it off before it's a permanent fixture on your rump.

    My reason for mentioning? Gelato, as much as I love a good scoop of it, is trying to demonize ice cream for the fat in it which is actually far more healthy than the higher sugar content in gelato. No matter what you're eating, half the fat doesn't--as they'd love to infect your brain with the idea of--mean you get to consume it twice as much. Stop hating on fat (especially milkfat, which has been shown to LOWER bad cholesterol pffth on them). Next they'll go telling us our salmon should be replaced with tilapia and our olive oil with broth to boil everything in... Enjoy either one, in moderation, but I'd blow a raspberry at the less fat notion. It's called the "SnackWell Phenomena," (phenomena, theory, etc) where quite reliably you end up eating more, more calories and more sugar in particular, because the sugary, low-fat treats don't fill you up; you get hungry faster.

  • I really like making cupcakes, esp. decorating them, but I also REALLY like eating them, so I haven't been making them...
    N815394_32920449_260_small

    I'd start with getting a healthy(er) cupcake recipe, perhaps like this one:

    http://www.handletheheat.com/2010/05/healthy-almond-cupcakes-with.html

    Then I'd see what happened if I used those teeny tiny like muffin tins that are like an inch and a half diameter. Then hopefully your brain will say "Whoa you! You just had five cupcakes! Slow down girlfriend!" But it won't actually be so bad because they're so little it'll be like you had one regular sized cupcake.

    As far as giving them to people, why not bring them to work? People love cupcakes and they'd be all like "Whoo hoo, Kristin brought us cupcakes!" and they'd be so happy. I probably wouldn't give them to homeless people, because of the whole sugar-causes-cavities-and-they-probably-aren't going-to-the-dentist-and-anyway-they-need-more substancial-food-than-cupcakes-things.
    Do you go out to bars? You could bring them to a bar you go to often and let them other patrons munch on them. (Assuming it's ok with the bartender/owner)

    Or you could channel your love of making and decorating cupcakes into learning how to do fancy pancy cru da ta (sp?) like carving radishes to look like flowers, etc.

  • Where can I buy good bulk candy in Seattle?
    Avatar_default

    There's a place on the top floor (food court floor) of Westlake Mall downtown that has bulk candy of many varieties and I've noticed bulk M&Ms specifically. It's right near the monorail boarding area.

  • Looking for chocolate made without refined sugar in Seattle
    Montana_thurderstorm_small

    I did the no refined sugar thing for two years. For some reason it never occurred to me to eat unsweetened chocolate, so I suffered a bit. I did learn that unsweetened dried mango helps with chocolate cravings. Weird I know, and maybe it was just me, but there it is. Also, bananas peeled and cut in half and impaled on popsicle sticks were my icecream. Another thing I've been doing more recently is making my oatmeal with cacao nibs in it. Good luck!

  • Female symbol shaped cookie cutters
    Qlandav2ex_small

    Made out of solid copper no less. Why not bake the cookies and gift the cookie cutter to her at the same time to remember the gesture by later.

    http://www.kitchengifts.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=GEFEM&Category_Code=miscellaneous

  • Store Bought Pie Crusts
    Hey_girl_hey_small

    If you have a food processor pie crust takes about 5 minutes to make.

    Failing that I would recommend the crust at Grand Central Bakery:

    http://www.grandcentralbakery.com/

  • How are sugar cubes made?
    Gold-head_small

    Sugar cubes are made in molds.

    One of sugar's unique properties is that a liquid solution of it granulates when dried; it forms little cubical crystals or grains, which you see in granulated sugar. But if this is done in molds, it will form large solids in the shape of the mold, composed of lots of these grains stuck together. Sugar starts as a liquid, made from cane or beets or whatever.

    Originally, starting in the 12th century or thereabouts, which this was discovered, these shapes were big cones (or loaf shapes in more primitive cases) called a sugarloaf, which weighed maybe ten pounds or so. Up until fairly recently, you'd buy a sugar loaf and snip off bits of it with a special pair of scissors called "sugar nips" when you wanted some. Then you could smash or grind or dissolve the little piece in your recipe. My great-grandparents bought (and sold; he was  grocer) their sugar this way at least part of the time, in the late 1800s and probably into the 1900s.

    In the middle of the 19th century, a guy named Jakub Krystof Rad in what is now the Czech Republic invented the sugarcube by pouring the liquid into small square molds to dry. Supposedly he did so at the behest of his wife, who had cut herself once too often with her sugar nips.

    Refs:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_loaf

    Czech page on the invention of the sugarcube in the town of Dacice -- with photos of a sugarloaf with mold.

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