(ugh. horrible picture. horrible dark winter and lack of natural light. very, very pretty pan)
I love potato scones. You can make an excellent breakfast by frying up a couple of them and topping them with some fried tomato and slices of smoked salmon. They are the perfect textural addition to a bacon roll. They make for a very indulgent grilled cheese sandwich.
I'm going to go back to buying them at the store.
To make potato scones you simply mix some flour into some mashed potatoes and cook them on a buttered griddle. The advertised ratio of flour to potato is about 1:5. I tried this easy recipe the other day and it was a disaster. My dough was really, really wet so I had to add quite a bit more flour than suggested just to get it in any kind of shape. The recipes said to roll it out and cut circles of dough to fry up. I was sort of squishing disks directly onto my skillet. They stuck and would absolutely not be turned. I then remembered that I now own a very beautiful copper-bottomed non-stick frying pan so I tried them in there. This was better. I still had to drop rounds of dough onto the pan and flatten them out with my spatula, but at least they were browning nicely and somewhat willing to turn. I expected to make a huge pile. I ended up with three. All the rest of the dough ended up in a half-charred lump. And they were only ok.
I guess I'll try again in the future. There was one that was almost tasty and the promise of that could be enough to battle again. The texture/taste was softer and fresher than the ones from the store. But a whole package of those ones only costs about 49p. That's not a lot of money to spend to save a pretty big pain in the ass.
Moving on.
Let's say you want to do some baking and you want to use whisky. Personally, I like baking with Jack Daniels, but if I felt the need to keep it Scottish, I would use Bell's. Bell's is a blended whisky which means that it's a mutt. Unlike a single malt which only comes from a single distillery, a blended whisky is from many sources and this makes its character less defined. In the case of Bell's you get something quite sweet and smooth, i.e. something that's not going to make your cake taste like peat. Plus the blends are way, way cheaper and if you're going to be masking the subtleties with chocolate, fruit and mounds of sugar, you don't need the expensive stuff. You should add a tiny bit of water to a nice single malt, you should never add cake batter.
Lidl do a really good single malt for twelve quid. I've been drinking it for a couple of months, but I heard it's a Christmas-only thing, so I'm off to stock up on a truckload more later.
I made a whisky cream for haggis with it recently. Probably it would've tasted the same with Tesco Value but it was a nice idea.
Posted by: avegancalledbacon | January 27, 2009 at 07:17 PM