A few months ago, I was in a chat conversation with a colleague from support. I had helped her with a question, and then she closed off with the message that I should take a break because I worked so hard, and maybe have a snack. I thought that was a sweet thing to say. So we started chatting about snacks, which should not come as a surprise to ( Read more... )

The Judge Dredd comics are an interesting artefact of the 1980s: it’s what British comic writers thought how the US urban landscape would develop into a full-on distopia. I own the old, first-edition RPG books. The rules are uninspiring (as most rule-sets were in the late 80’s were) but there is a treasure trove of info on the world of Judge Dredd ( Read more... )

I have been making chocolates with flexible silicone molds, because those are easy to get the chocolate out of once it’s been set. I did try an experiment with filled chocolates: applying the chocolate with a brush to the edge of the mold, let that set, then pour in the filling (I used caramel sauce) and then fill it off with more chocolate. ( Read more... )

I’ve been on a manga-reading spree these days. It all started out with Dungeon Meshi, which merges my interest in RPGs and dungeon delving with my interest in cooking and eating. From there, I branched out to other manga, with a specific focus on manga featuring cooking and food. One of the manga that I came across with and really liked was Isekai ( Read more... )

Every evening we re-group and watch a few videos on YouTube. I’ve built up quite a nice bubble with travel videos (mostly in Japan…), cooking, architecture and history, so it’s not hard to find interesting stuff to watch.
Since mid-September, there were some videos popping up about moon cakes, the traditional sweets to eat during the Chinese mid- ( Read more... )

We have some silicon molds for chocolates, which we use to make the occasional sweet. You know, melting chocolate, making ganache, pouring it in, etc.
But one thing I never learned was to temper chocolate. Just like steel, chocolate forms crystals as it cools down. And if you cool it down slowly from the right temperature (a process called “ ( Read more... )

For many pastry recipes, you need sugar syrup at a specific temperature. We have two digital thermometers for that purpose, but we’ve been having a lot of trouble with them: they just wouldn’t stay on and switched off immediately. After some research (and a failed attempt at making nougat), we found that these digital ones use some kind of metal ( Read more... )

We had our annual apple picking event at a local orchard yesterday! Every Saturday in September, the orchard is open for people to pick their own - and while they sell the apples really cheap, they are even cheaper when you pick them yourself! And of course, apples fresh off the tree are delicious!
We were joined by friends B & J and their dog. We ( Read more... )

Half an hour drive away is the city of Den Bosch. Their regional speciality is Bossche Bollen, a choux filled with heavy whipped cream and coated with chocolate. They are also called ‘chocoladebollen’ (‘chocolate balls’) or, phonetically, sjekladebollen.
All throughout my teenage years, I rode horses at a pony club tucked away in the village where I ( Read more... )

The cooking store in town has the molecular cooking kits on stock, so we swung by yesterday to get an additional spaghetti kit: twice as many tubes means that producing the spaghetti is twice as fast! Turns out they had a sale, and the kits were 50% off. So we got two! (When we got home, we found out why: the kits had a best-by date of mid-2016… I ( Read more... )