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If you’re into decorating cookies you’ve probably had to decide more than once whether you were going to use a Royal Icing or a Sugar Glaze/Glacé Icing* to decorate your cookies. Both can be used for decoration purposes, though they…
Have you ever made icing to decorate your cookies, donuts, or maybe a cake? Were you also amazed at just how much powdered sugar you had to add to only a very little bit of water? It’s common for recipes…
A common snack for breakfast, or in between meals, in the Netherlands is a product called ‘ontbijtkoek’, ‘kruidkoek’ or ‘peperkoek’*. It’s best translated as a soft gingerbread cake. It’s soft, and moist, and contains a mix of spices. It’s so…
Making candy is often described as a science, requiring thermometers to boil that sugar syrup to the exact right temperature. Alternatively, you can cook the syrup to a prescribed stage, “cook to hard crack”, which can be daunting. If you…
If you think of chemistry, you might be thinking of a lab, with people wearing white lab coats, where lots of complicated, maybe even dangerous chemicals are being mixed and tested by experienced chemists. You might almost forget that your…
Rock sugar, or rock candy, comes in many shapes and sizes. You might be familiar with the brightly colored version on a stick, you might regularly use it in your (savory) Asian recipes, or, you might use it to sweeten…
Honeycomb definitely is one of the more theatrical candies to make. Once you add that baking soda to the boiling hot sugar, the fizzing and puffing are sure to impress your viewers. Once the show is over and your honeycomb…
When visiting friends who regularly brew their own beer, they told us about this great sugar syrup they had made to add to their beer. It was a dark brown, almost coffee/chocolatey, syrup with a great flavor. They had made…
Making caramel, marshmallows, honeycomb, and most other sugar candies generally starts by boiling a sugar syrup. Often, you’ll find very detailed instructions for this step, having to boil it to a specific temperature or ‘stage’. Deviating from these precise instructions may…
No matter where you look, there’s a good chance you’ll find some surprising science hidden in a seemingly not sciency dish. That is definitely the case for these kurma, which we lovingly call “Trini kurma” since the recipe comes from…
Sugar definitely is one of the most complex and fascinating ingredients in the kitchen. It sweetens your food, but can also be used to create a whole lot of different textures and structures in your food! Sugar helps thicken a…
In the past decade or so I have lived abroad in several countries. One of the aspects of living abroad is sharing (or telling about) the food from where you’re from. The Dutch stroopwafels (syrup waffles) so far have been…