Honey doughnuts

****** My mind, which had been peacefully mulling over honey cookies and honey apple sorbet, took a sudden sideways leap like a horse shying

Aha! You too! I have a butterfly brain which loves knowledge but also adores variety, but that is the gentle side; I also get taken by surprise with these sideways leaps and have occasionally thought of them as “shying”… Not quite been unseated yet, but no promises :)

Honey. Glazed. Donuts.

WANT.

Want now.

These sound divine, but I too avoid deep frying with religious fervour. The mess, the calories and all that. However, a while back I was in one of my favourite restaurants in Athens – the salads are great, most of the main courses are good and the desserts are extraordinary – and they had loukoumades, which are somewhat like doughnut-holes, with lavender honey and sprinkled lavender on top. The lavender honey had been steeped with lavender so you got extra lavender flavour. This made me think of that. Yummy. For another time. I am now salivating…

mmmmm … honey ………

I think I have a ginger and honey cake recipe here somewhere. Must find it.

And people do still deep-fry. I noticed in Target the other day single AND double pan deep-fry units. They try to tell themselves that by changing the type of oil they use it is *really* making a healthy difference. hahahaha

PS. Mum finally got her bridgework to *stay in*. But they discovered at the same time she had advanced gum disease on one side (despite the fact she had been going to the dentist fortnightly with all the bridgework trouble.) So she has been taking her homeopathics as per usual. Over the weekend she had a flare up of thrush. In her mouth. Honestly, between the pair of you I don’t know what to do!!!

How wonderful! I’d just gotten Chalice the other day (the day before it was supposed to be out) which reminded me I hadn’t been following your blog since you moved away from Livejournal… so I came over here, and had just registered so I could tell you how excellent Chalice was, and you are already on to honey recipes.

Can I play?

But first – thank you for Chalice. I’m most of the way through it for a second time. I think it will be a while before I work out all the ways in which I like it, but the bees and honey were certainly up there. And themes you have touched on before – inventing one’s own apprenticeship*, a bit of the beauty and the beast thing, if in a very different form, and perhaps something in there about a women’s magic that isn’t all about being weak and submissive.

(Better, while I was looking at the otherwise pretty awful selection of fiction – Chalice was under “children’s” so I hadn’t found it yet – I met a very bright undergrad who was in equal despair over the selection, and also how boring is his degree program. So if he decides he has any interest in it at all, I think I will try to adopt him and put him to work, and probably lend him Dragonhaven, which he wants to read. Minions!)

Honey Cake

+ 1/2 cup honey
+ 1 egg, beaten
+ 1/4 cup butter, softened
+ 1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
+ 1 teaspoon baking powder
+ 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
+ 1/4 teaspoon salt
+ 1 cup hot water
+ Flavoring, optional

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together honey and butter. Mix in egg. Slowly mix in dry ingredients, and then bit by bit mix in the hot water until you have a smooth batter. Add flavoring if you wish. (I usually use fiori di sicilia, which is vanilla and citrus – a bit of vanilla extract and lemon zest would probably do nicely. A splash of rosewater or a pinch of cinnamon would also work.)

Pour into a loaf pan, or an eight-inch cake pan, cupcake pans, or what have you. Bake for about half an hour, or until the top is firm when tapped lightly.

(Okay, so this is pasted in from another article – but it’s one I wrote, if some time ago.)

* Maybe we all spend a lot of time wondering if we really ought to be just making it up as we go along. But, um, yeah.

Hard to imagine anything I could get into more trouble with than doughnuts and deep frying: the first for my waistline (there must be a waistline around here somewhere) and the second–well, I’ll save it for the Klutz Klub, but I have a burn on my upper arm from baking that I can’t even account for. Presumably, if I’d been paying enough attention to know how I did it, I wouldn’t have done it.

HONEY! The exact day that Chalice, beautiful Chalice, arrived, but before I’d read it, I was giving a tour at my museum job and talking about nonWestern medicine. An Irish woman said that in the hospital where her son works, doctors now put some kind of special honey on infected wounds that don’t respond to any antibiotics and the honey cures them. You probably knew that, but I sure didn’t.

I made Chalice last two nights, but that was the best I could do. I will now reread it, lovingly.

Yeah, so my family DIDN’T buy me a copy of Chalice, as I had hoped/assumed. Shame on them. They DID get me a digital camera, which is pretty awesome. And spent most of the day with me. Which was great. I suppose I forgive them.
This just means that I have to buy myself a birthday present now, I suppose.
It’ll have to be belated though. I have a meeting tonight, and then rehearsal until midnight. Sigh.
Oh. If only I had time. And didn’t have exams [ALREADY!?! we haven't even had a month of classes yet. Unbelievable...] this week and next, so probably won’t manage to find a way to get to a bookstore /library until after Wednesday. At the earliest. No fair. You keep posting excerpts and I WANT TO READ IT! So I’ll find a way.
:)

Have a marvelous day tomorrow. [as I began typing this about an hour ago and only just returned to my computer to find that I hadn't finished/posted it yet, I'll end it here, with happiness and birthday cake and chocolate and good things.]

–Julia

I admit that I have a long-held aversion to deep frying. All that potential for deathly burns. I suspect it goes back to that cigarette burn on my hand at Las Vegas when I was eight. Oh yes, and probably the year after when I played with the lovely new thermos full of hot water and scalded my knees just before we left for an eight hour road trip. I’m working on it though; I can now use ovens without cringing too much, although my husband had to go out and buy heavy-duty elbow-length padded oven gloves. (Watching other people grab oven trays with a loose tea towel makes me avert my eyes, much like needles.)

I love tempura, but it’s hard to find good stuff (while on this ridiculous house-saving budget thing). And I miss prawn crackers. So this is quite tempting…

And maybe nobody out there deep fries any more either.
They do down here in The South of America! People around here would starve without deep frying. Although we had a doughnut maker when I was a kid that worked like a waffle iron. I miss the doughnut maker.

my friend shirly does a lot of old home baking including donuts,mmm donuts. she also makes the best home made chocolate fudge! i get the privilege of taste testing a lot of it, probable why i don’t seem to lose any weight lol. but it is too good to resist.

My father was a real Baker’s Friend, and he persuaded my mother to make doughnuts precisely once when I was very young. As I remember, they were very good, and he kept trying to get her to do it again. She wouldn’t–hated the way the smell penetrated the house–and her excuses were 1) they weren’t as good as her mother’s, and 2) she’d lost the recipe and no one had it any more. I got pretty much all of the recipe from one of my aunts and could figure out the missing bit, but *I* hate the way the smell penetrates the house, so I have never made them. (They were a cake doughnut, by the way, not yeast-raised.) I do *like* doughnuts, but it’s hard to find any that are worth the calories.

****I was seriously addicted to French fried onion rings and no one made them correctly, with the light, flaky, crunchy type batter instead of the awful heavy sticky bready kind.****

Yes, battered rather than breaded are the only kind worth eating. But that flaky crunchy batter seems to be a New England thing–everywhere else that I’ve been, the batters might be tasty, but the crunch is not there.

That looks lovely. Yum.

I stopped by Other Change of Hobbit in Berkeley yesterday and they DID NOT HAVE CHALICE WAAUUUGH. The owner said he didn’t know why they hadn’t received it. Stupid delays. Boooo. Borderlands Books doesn’t have it either. WHAAAAT.

*sulks*

Right. The local shops had their chance. It’s probably not their fault; I’m betting Amazon ate all their copies. I’ve made a point of buying locally recently, so now I’m going to indulge myself, so there.

*clicks PLACE ORDER*

Hmmm. I wonder if the properties of honey related to allergies still work after cooking? I was under the impression that honey helps by exposing one to small doses of non-threatening pollen left over in the honey, and if that’s the case, then the pollen essence (or whatever) has already been DIGESTED, so it should be unfazed by further denaturing through cooking. Any thoughts? My allergies are terrible, and I would love any excuse to buy more incredibly-expensive local honey. Also, I read in an old pamphlet by a nutritionist, author of the “Master Cleanse Diet”, that unfiltered, preferably grade B maple syrup (disregarding help with allergies) is actually a better sweetener because it contains a ton of minerals, has a stronger taste (so you use less), and is more useful to your body than honey is because honey has already been “broken down” once (by bees), and makes it too easy on your digestive system. Again, if you would like to offer your own opinions or observations?

I think the Universe is trying to tell me something because I have been craving these for WEEKS!

Honey Ricebubble Slice – a traditional treat for Kiwi kids

125g butter
half a cup of sugar
2 TBSP honey
4 cups rice bubbles (popped rice breakfast cereal that is just plain – no coatings or flavouring)

Grease a swiss roll tin and have a large bow with ricebubbles in it all ready

Mix up honey and sugar and butter into a pot with a solid base and melt – simmer as if making toffee (which you kindof are) for about 5 min – depending on how crunchy you like it, somewhere between soft ball and hard ball stage

OK this bit you have to work REALLY quickly as it will set in the bowl. Pour honey toffee mix over ricebubbles, mix thru as well and as fast as you can and pour into greased tin and push down til its about an inch or so thick and firm together and leave to set.

Cut into squares to serve!

I got Chalice last night. Thank you. I’m only into Part Three because I had to go to bed. Sigh. Thank you. It’s wonderful.

Doughnuts. Yum. And THANK YOU for being one of the increasingly small number of people who spell the damn word properly. DOUGHNUT. Not DONUT.

“A very small, earnest angel with your best interests at heart”

I love this idea!

I just finished Chalice this morning! I almost finished it last night but remarkably fell asleep of sheer exhaustion* three pages before the end. I loved it, it was so wonderful. I nearly laughed aloud when Chalice told the people to light candles for her – it was such a Robin thing to say. Now I feel the need to go out and get some beeswax and honey candles to burn for you when you ask for candles – the regular sort will feel inadequate now. It ended the way I’d been secretly hoping it would end but I couldn’t figure out how it could end like that. I’m still not exactly clear on what happened at the climax** but in sort of the same way that I’ve never been clear on the last half of the last book of Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster series – I get to be reading too fast trying to see what will happen next that I invariably miss something, or several little somethings.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know how very perfect it was. I’m glad that this one did not remain a short story.

Also, I’ve been craving honey recently, for which I blame you.

*the exhaustion is not the fault of Chalice, but rather getting up early and having to be awake all day long and then sleeping poorly for no reason.

**see the above footnote on exhaustion

What is with all the bees lately? I just read Jean Stratton-Porter’s The Keeper of the Bees, before that The Secret Life of Bees, and now I’ve got Chalice!! Which I think subliminally influenced me in our latest dinner party but not fancy venture: Honey tasting. It was a lazy trick, but I just got several varieties of honey (the Belgian Sunflower honey is my favorite) and served them with sopapiallas and flakey biscuits. It was a rousing success, and upside, everyone left their jars of honey. I’ve got honey for months, most of it very tasty. So, anyway, easy party idea, very little prep, just some basic cheese, some white wine, and honey. Rousing success, inspired by you Robin, mostly anyway.

Oh dear…. I am so going to have to order Chalice. I did hope I could wait until it came out over here, but….

I’ve never deep fried, it’s the one form of cooking I’ve not learnt how to do. But I believe you can buy special moulds for baking doughnuts – okay, not the same thing, I don’t suppose, but probably a good second-best.

My mother used to make corn fritters, but she shallow-fried hers. I was debating trying to make them the other day. I think this was the recipe she used (my apologies for the measurements being in old money, but it’s a very old cookery book!):

4 oz plain flour (c 120 g)
1 egg
1/4 pint milk (N.B. UK pint – 5 fl oz or 150 ml, not US)
11 oz tin creamed sweet corn (I’m almost sure my mother used ordinary sweetcorn)
Salt and black pepper

Sift the flour into a mixing bowl, make a well in the centre and add the egg and milk. Using a wooden spoon, mix from the centre, gradually drawing in the flour from around the sides of the bowl. Beat to make a smooth batter. Stir in the sweet corn and season to taste with salt and freshly ground pepper. Heat about 2 oz (50 g) butter and 1 tbs (15 ml) olive or corn oil in a frying -pan. When hot, add tablespoons of the corn fritter batter, cook until golden brown on the underside, then turn each fritter and fry on the other side. Fry the fritters a few at a time – they take 1-2 minutes to cook; keep the fritters warm while frying the next batch.

Hmmm, definitely sounds like something to have very, very soon….