Recipe from GroupRecipe.com at http://www.grouprecipes.com/68275/truffle-tarts-with-raspberries.html

When I was making these, I thought the recipe was using too much butter for the crust, so I cut back -- that was a mistake. The crusts fell apart when they were picked up. Everything tasted great, but it was very messy.

Pan prep -- line with wax paper to create a handle for removing.

Baseline of the crust. I also bought a mint cookie package.

Separation of cookie and filling

Tartlet crusts with centers. Most of one batch was a raspberry center, but I used a few cookie fillings too. The second batch was mint flavored where I added a drop of mint extract to the crust mix and then used the mint cookie filling as the center.

Whipped ganache.




Final product

Some flour tortillas, an egg wash and some cooked apples. Let's roll them and fry them!

After visiting & picking apples at an orchard, I have plenty of material to make some yummy desserts.

This is a quick batter with apple bits in them and then I deep fried to make something like a donut hole.

Mmmm, now that is good and fresh -- homemade chocolate sauce. This stuff is so easy to make and fun, too.

1 1/2 C	sugar
3/4 C	water
2 T	light corn syrup
1/4 t	kosher salt
3/4 C	cocoa, unsweetened
3/4 stick	butter, chopped into table spoon pieces
1 T	vanilla extract

Combine sugar, corn syrup and water in a medium sauce pan. Bring sugar solution to a boil. Add salt. Reduce heat to medium and, using a whisk, mix in the cocoa. Add one piece of butter at a time and mix it in before adding the next piece. Try to keep the liquid at a low simmer, which might require increasing the heat. You can replace the cocoa and butter with Dutch-processed cocoa.

After the ingredients are mixed in, let the syrup come to a boil then reduce heat to medium low, but keep a simmer. Reduce the syrup to a slight thickening.

After it is cool, you can pour it into a squirt bottle. After the chocolate sauce is safely put away, you can get your first cup of hot chocolate. Set the pan over medium low heat. Deglaze your pan by adding a little milk and scrapping the pan. Slowly add more milk to deglaze the pan. Scrap the sides and bottom to work all the chocolate into the milk.

Rachel is enjoying the first cup of hot chocolate.



Rachel is also enjoying licking out the used funnel.

After Liz's visit, we talked about what can someone do with almonds besides eating straight. I suggested almond butter. Now I finally made it.

I roasted in my oven at 250° for about 30 minutes a good handful of almonds. After they cooled completely, I ground them in my food processor until they became butter. Very simply and very good flavor. I would describe the taste as smoother then peanut butter.

They say pride comes before the fall. This might be true, but this chili is amazing!! There will be a chili cook off in my department soon, so I had to make a dry run of my chili. I think this is terrific stuff and I am no longer using the store-bought season packet!

Before

After

Our friend Laura, blew me away when she described this way of making a crust. It totally makes sense, but I never thought about it. The first set of pictures is the mini pies as the title suggests. I'm using my coffee bean grinder to do all the work.

Grind up or crush up a few cookies, pictured here is a sugar cookie and chocolate chip. Add a few pecans and then grind.


Grinding makes the crumb.


Pour the crumb into any container. It doesn't have to be oven safe, because it is only going to see the inside of the refrigerator.







Now for the pink. This time I using a full 9" pie pan using animal cookies.

Crushed

Butter to make it stay togetyer.

CHOCOLATE pudding

Warning: this is a geek posting. Every so often, you'll find them here. I am a programmer by trade and a cook by passion.

Situation:
You are using ASP.NET and have Masterpages. You want to display the title for your content pages, but there is no <title> tag on the content pages. Instead, you notice there is a title attribute on the @Page directive. How does this work? How can you take advantage of it?

Follow this set up to display the value from the title attribute. I added a few advanced concepts that adds a degree of professionalism.

Masterpage HTML Source
<head id="headPage" runat="server">
  <title></title>
</head>

Masterpage codebehind (VB.NET)
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
     headPage.Title = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(headPage.Title)
End Sub

Content page
<%@ Page ... MasterPageFile="~/MyMaster.Master" title="Recipe Details" %>

This is it. Try it out. There is nothing more you have to do. Keep reading if you want to see some more you can do.

Masterpage codebehind (VB.NET) Advanced Topic
Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
     headPage.Title = String.Format("{0}{1}{2}", My.Settings.WebPageTitlePrefix, HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(headPage.Title), My.Settings.WebPageTitleSuffix)
End Sub

Here is the idea. Have you noticed professional sites have their name on every page's title? If you visit Microsoft.com's Office pages, then you'll see "Microsoft Office Online" in every title. Use the above code to do the same thing.

You either need to create the two settings I have listed or replace those two settings (WebPageTitlePrefix and WebPageTitleSuffix) with literal string values. I like the settings because the value for My.Settings are stored in the web.config. This technique allows me to change the value without having to compile the application and deploy it. I can simply access the web.config and edit the values.