Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut

Rainbow Cookies is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

At the beginning of Life of Pi, the narrator promises that it is a story to make you believe in God. When I got to the end of the book, for a moment I thought that the book had failed in its purpose. However, after a moment of trying to puzzle out what the author meant, I realized it was one of the most brilliant arguments in favor of believing in God, and one that particularly appealed to the writer in me.

So let me begin this way: These are macaroons to make you believe in coconut.

* * * * *

I hated coconut all my life. I don't mean I disliked it; I truly thought there wasn't a single thing worth eating that came from those hard, hairy, brown things. To be honest, I was a picky eater when I was young, but coconut was on its own level. I hated the way it squeaked between my teeth. I recognized it from the first bite of any unfamiliar food. Chewy yet not, sticky but not soft, the appeal was entirely lost on me.

It wasn't just the texture that bothered me. One of my most vivid memories from my trip to Turkey involves coconut, this time in liqueur form. My mother and I devoted a week of our trip to a blue cruise, bay-hopping around south-western Turkey on board an eight-passenger gulet, a wooden sailboat, though if the sail was ever employed during our trip, it was only once.

Our captain could steer the boat one-handed, the other hand occupied by a can of Efes Pilsner. All of my American no-drinking-and-driving mental programming made this amusing to watch, but not concerning. He obviously had the hang of it, and really there wasn't much to run into other than small islands. I figured one of us would see the island coming and grab the wheel. He already let us do that whenever we wanted.

He didn't speak as much English as the other crew members, but he was a likable, relaxed guy all around, friendly and happy. One of the things he seemed most excited about was Wednesday night.

"On Wednesday, we party!" he would repeat to us at odd times, without any explanation.

Considering we were floating on a beautiful blue expanse, rarely sharing a bay for the morning, afternoon or night with more than one other gulet, we thought it was a joke. Who were we going to party with? We were already lounging and tanning (well, not me), swimming, eating and drinking amongst ourselves. I wasn't sure what would change that short of a hot tub dropping from the sky onto our tiny deck.

Wednesday came, and we piled in a taxi van to cross the peninsula to Marmaris. Surprisingly, we made it there alive and spent the afternoon shopping in the bazaar. I found a bracelet at a silver shop there, one so unique that I'm never able to describe it to anyone in detail, which I would subsequently lose in the back of another taxi when we returned to Istanbul.

We returned to our boat, once again surprised to be alive, but tired from the day's trip. The captain greeted us and urged us to join him for the party at the discotheque on the shore.

As a group, we looked at the scrubby, dry, isolated coastline.

Still, the invitation to party was repeated, and it was very tempting to see just how a discotheque was managing to hide in the middle of nowhere. It turned out that "discotheque" was a slight overstatement, at least in my mind. A wooden fence around an outdoor bar didn't quite match the image in my mind. We sat down on cushions around the low table in one corner, chatting with the owner (who seemed to be good buddies with our captain and the captains of the other gulets anchored in the bay) while his sons minded the bar. My mother, who was doing her best to be a bad influence on me during my college years to combat my stick-in-the-mud tendencies, tried to get me to smoke from the hookah. Tried, but didn't succeed. At one point, I looked through a crack in the fence behind me and saw a gigantic shadow of a scorpion. My gaze zeroed in on the very small scorpion throwing it, but it certainly made me question the wisdom of sitting nearly on the ground there.

The coconut in this story--I hadn't forgotten!--arrived then, in small, skinny glasses filled with a dubious pink liquid. I tried to refuse, and learned they were on the house. I took a tiny sip, and my nose wrinkled immediately. Coconut. Jolly Rancher and Coconut in burning alcoholic form. I set the glass down and forgot about it...until another came.

Now, I was pretty used to guys flirting with me in Turkey by then, including the one I usually describe as a Turkish Antonio Bandaras but better looking. I hadn't had any of the bad experiences with it that you hear about from women traveling in foreign countries, just entertaining ones, so I had no problem with it. A glance over at the bar made it pretty obvious why I was getting free drinks. If they'd sent over an endless supply of Diet Coke (I can't believe I drank that), that might have been different, but coconut? I wasn't impressed.

But it turned out that they were making up new drinks just for me, and my mother reminded me that it was rude to refuse hospitality like that, as long as it was harmless. So, I drank both drinks. Or, at least I'm pretty sure I got through them all, since I vaguely remember singing for other drunk people in the "discotheque" under the stars.

The moral of the story is that foreign travel may broaden your palate considerably, but some foods just never have a chance. Coconut did not receive the same invitation into my eating life that many of the other foods I encountered did. Over the next few years, though, a few coconutty things slipped into my diet, like fresh coconut cracked open on the beach on my honeymoon in Costa Rica (it was okay) or coconut milk in Thai curries. Nevertheless, I was fairly certain I'd never like anything that proudly proclaimed a coconut-heavy favor.

* * * * *

With that in mind, cue my disappointment with being assigned to make the coconut macaroons at my first cooking job. I was assisting the American-style baker in the restaurant's bakeshop, and despite the fact that everything I'd tasted of hers then (and now I can say everything since then, too) was the best I'd ever had of those items before, there was no way that I was going to like the macaroons.

Who likes to make food they don't like at all? Not me. Not unless it makes someone close to me very, very happy, and even then I'll get grumpy and complain about it. That aside, I was going to be working with coconut every week, smelling it, touching it. I wasn't pleased.

Still, it was my job, and I did what I had to do while she instructed me how to make the macaroons. I pulsed the coconut in a food processor. I mixed the gooey ingredients in a large bowl. I got my hands all sticky and slimy scooping small mounds of it onto the sheet pan. (My technique had yet to develop then.) They went into the convection oven, and I watched them carefully, turning them so they acquired a golden brown that surprised me, since all the macaroons I'd seen were giant, white balls with shreds of coconut sticking out of them every which way. But they still weren't going to taste good. No way, no how.

Oh my goodness I was wrong.

The differences I'd noticed before all served glorious purposes. Grinding the shredding coconut did away with the stringiness I hated about it. The small size made for the perfect marriage of warm, squishy insides and golden crunchy/chewy outsides. After one taste, it became a ritual for me to eat one hot macaroon every week as soon as possible to when they came out of the oven. They're delicious cold, and actually take on a nice chewiness if stored in an airtight container for a few days, but when they're fresh and warm, they're heaven.

But it wasn't just the macaroons that I came to love. Soon there after, the assistant pastry chef gave me a taste of his coconut sorbet as it came out of the mixer, and I've adored coconut sorbet ever since--as long as it doesn't have shreds of coconut in it. I've even been known to order drinks with coconut rum in them.

Consider this my public apology to my Turkish bartenders for not liking their drinks.

* * * * *

Since we're talking about apologies and forgiveness, I'll confess that I told a bit of a lie at the beginning:

These aren't the macaroons that made me believe in coconut.

I know, I'm sorry, but the recipe isn't mine. I can't bring myself to share the recipe without permission. Something in me doesn't quite want to share it, either, which is strange because generally I'm all for sharing my recipes and knowledge. But these are special. Magical.

However, I'm not going to tease you and then leave you empty-handed. I've been working on a number of variations, tweaked and changed enough that I won't feel like they're not mine to share. Raspberry-Pomegranate, which tastes like a jam sandwich cookie, but with the texture of a coconut macaroon. Cocoa Nib-Creme de Cacao, a grown-up chocolate chip cookie. But the most successful so far was a fusion of two of the variations I've tried: the macadamia nut center and the lime-rum macaroon.

My second run of these today yielded great results. The zest of two limes seemed like it would be too much, but the lime flavor was perfect--blending enough with the coconut to be subtle, but definitely there. I wanted to post the recipe itself tonight, but I have a few things to work out first. I still want to amp up the rum flavor, and the macaroons are spreading too much, most likely due to the fact that I'm still getting used to my oven, but I need to rule out flaws in the recipe before I post it.

In the meantime, I'll demo the technique, which you could probably apply to other macaroon recipes out there.

	First, pulse the coconut in a food processor. You may have to do it in more than one batch, depending on the size of your recipe and the size of your food processor. Add the coconut to a large bowl with the flour and the sugar and mix thoroughly.
	Drizzle melted butter over the coconut mixture, then use your hands to work it evenly in, rubbing any clumps with drier parts of the mixture until you don't see any more clumps. (I apologize for the fact that this photo resembles "yellow snow". This is definitely okay to eat.)
	Whisk egg whites, cream, corn syrup, rum, and lime zest together.
	Pour the wet mixture in with the dry mixture and stir with a spatula--or better yet a bowl scraper--until combined.
	Form the the macaroons with a small scoop and place them in even rows on a Silpat or parchment paper.
	A note on the macadamia nuts: they should be salt-free and toasted. Two or three minutes in the oven at 350 degrees is plenty. Also, if you toast the macadamias immediately before making the cookies, watch them in the oven carefully, because the nuts will heat the macaroons from the inside and speed up the cooking process.
	To put the macadamia nuts in the center of the macaroons, press one into the cookie while it is still in the scoop, and then fill the empty space behind it with the coconut that gets squeezed out the sides. Make sure the bottom of each macaroon is flat and clean.
	Bake the macaroons at 350 degrees for 18 minutes, turning the pan around after the first ten to color them evenly. They should look golden brown and crispy, but not turn dark brown. Cool on racks, and make sure to eat one while they're still warm.

I paired the lime macaroons with a grapefruit sorbet I'd randomly decided to make up a mix for last night to use up some aging grapefruits. They worked quite well together even though they weren't made for each other. The cold and the natural flavor of the grapefruit cut the sweetness in the sorbet, and so it was a counterpoint to the sweeter cookies, rather than competing for the same sort of attention.



Stay tuned...I hope to have this recipe perfected in the near future! They'll only be Macaroons Based off of Macaroons to Make You Believe in Coconut, but I hope that they'll taste good all the same.

Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 2

Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 2 is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

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Last time on As the Fondant Liquefies, we made cherry-flavored fondant and dipped maraschino cherries in it, in preparation for dipping them in chocolate. Really, that's the hardest part of the whole process.

I decided to make another batch of cherries after the ones I documented in the original post and test the theory the Geeky Gnu and I had about pulling the hot fondant from the start instead of trying to cool it with a scraper on my small piece of marble. That and I wanted to prove I could do it all by myself. It worked very well, actually. After awhile, I got into a rhythm where I was kneading it like a cat, pressing half the mass of hot sugar down on the Silpat-covered marble with one hand and then the other half with the other, stretching it as high as I could each time. The fondant seemed to turn out much better--and crystallize much faster--this way.


Here's what it looked like when I managed to pull it away from my fingers and deposit it in a bowl:



And here it is after resting it overnight:



You can see how matte and powdery it looks, which I think is what we were going for. The problem with agitating the fondant by pulling and kneading it by hand is that the corn syrup imparts serious levels of stickiness to the stuff. Latex gloves were useless, because the fondant instantly bonded to them and wouldn't let go--fortunately, it wasn't so attached to my bare hands. My arms and hands and shoulders got very tired from the process, but at the same time I was fascinated by just how sticky it was, gluing my fingers together to the point that it was difficult to spread them. The novelty of it (and, of course, the sense of accomplishment, after having the task taken away from me by the big strong men the night before) definitely compensated for any and all physical discomfort. It was way more amazing than tiring, and I had fun laughing at myself for getting into this literal mess.

Mr. Gnu also made another batch of fondant using a food processor or a mixer, but he'll have to speak to how that worked out himself since I wasn't there for the making or using of it. I hear it turned out well...and he didn't have his fingers stuck together for twenty minutes.



The fondant dipping went much as it had the last time, although I did pick up a new trick. Mr. Gnu noted that the cherries that leaked the most at the top tended to be the ones that had fondant coating their stems. When I dipped my own batch, I tried to be very careful not to get any on the stems, but it seemed more important to make sure every glimpse of red cherry was blotted out by pink sugariness. Once the fondant had set, though, I found it was easy to remove just the fondant on the stems with a quick twist of it around the stems between my fingers, breaking and crumbling it away and leaving the cherry completely coated.

All right, that's enough about the fondant! It's time to move onto the reason we're all here: the chocolate.

First, you'll want to temper your chocolate using your favorite method (if you have one; if not, I suspect a Google search could take you to a better explanation than I would give at the moment). You can use white, milk, or dark chocolate for this, depending on how sweet you want the results to be. I lean toward a full-flavored dark chocolate to contrast with the intensely sweet cherries and fondant. The Callebaut I picked up was only about 52%, but it's a wonderful chocolate with plenty of cocoa flavor, not too much sugar, and a rich texture.



One of the biggest problems with chocolate-covered cherries is their tendency to leak through any weak spots in the chocolate, especially around the stems and on the bottoms, where the cherry will often sink through the chocolate before it sets and leave an instant hole underneath. I'd run into this when I'd made chocolate-covered cherries for the first time, so I tried a technique I found in Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner. I did a quick-and-dirty version of the advice he had, and piped discs of chocolate and let them set before I started to dip the cherries (you can see a few of them in the photo above). Then, I set each freshly-coated cherry onto a disc. It kept a layer of chocolate between the cherry and the Silpat, so for the most part it was a success, although I did have a couple where cherry syrup leaked out between the base and the chocolate around the cherry.

After that, it's just a matter of covering the cherries in chocolate. I found that holding the stem and dragging the cherry from side to side once or twice, letting the chocolate come right up to the stem, coated them nicely. Then I pulled them up, let a little of the chocolate drip off, and touched the bottom of the cherry to the surface of the chocolate once or twice to encourage more of the excess chocolate to stay behind. Once I was satisfied that there wasn't enough chocolate to form a gigantic foot around the bottom on the tray, I set the cherry on one of the discs I piped beforehand and left it to set up.



I also decorated some in the second batch with multicolored sanding sugar and sprinkles. Even though it looks okay in that photo, I don't recommend using the sanding sugar on chocolate. It looked pretty at first, but as the chocolate set the sugar took on a murky quality, especially from a distance. The sprinkles, however, looked bright and cheerful. They were a hit with a lot of people, but I didn't feel like the cherries needed the extra crunch from the sprinkles. There's enough contrast between the gooey centers and the chocolate as it is.



This is an example of a leaking cherry, although often they're more messy than this one. As I've noted before, the best way to avoid this is to make sure the cherry itself is completely covered in fondant, and then make sure the fondant is completely covered in an even layer of chocolate. Still, even if you're careful, you'll probably make a few cherries weep. Don't worry. They still taste just as good, and they don't seem to spoil any faster...not that I've ever had cherries around long enough to know just how long their shelf life is.

As for storing the cherries, if you don't have a baker's rack and zillions of sheet pans in your kitchen (someday, someday....), I recommend hitting up your friendly neighborhood pizza joint and asking very, very nicely for a few unused boxes. (Leave a generous tip in exchange, so they'll be open to doing it again!) Mr. Gnu was kind enough to stop at Pagliacci's on the way over and pick up ten extra large ones (we didn't need that many, but I know they will get used in the future since I already am temporarily storing coconut macaroons in one, and I've used them to dry royal icing flowers in the past). Line the box with parchment or wax paper to protect the box from leaking cherries, and you'll be able to reuse it.

If you use invertase in your fondant (see the first cherry post for more info on that), the cherries will need to sit out at room temperature for three to four days before they will be completely liquefied. If you don't have invertase, the cherries will take up to two weeks to liquefy, which means you have to plan ahead. Invertase is easily purchased online and inexpensive, although I now have a larger quantity of it living in my fridge than I'll use in my lifetime.




In the end, the cherries were a huge hit with everyone we gave them to. I wrapped two packages together for each family and couple in clear-topped plastic containers, one of cookies and one with chocolate-covered cherries and rainbow cookies. More than once, the person opening the present handed the cookies to the other recipient and hid the cherries for themselves! I think the best part about them is that they aren't hard to make, but enough delicious ingredients and extremely pleasant work go into them that they truly feel like you've made them with love, which I know I did.

But I can't help but wish that I could have given them dressed in just their shimmering, shiny pink sugar coatings. I suppose that's one of those rare glimpse of ineffable beauty that are too fragile or fleeting to be seen by anyone but the cook.



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Test Cherry #1

Test Cherry #1 is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

Test Cherry: Day One
Originally uploaded by the other tiger

As I was dipping a second round of cherries yesterday, I had three lose their stems and become "test cherries" or, in other words, the cherries I get to eat before they're ready without feeling guilty for wasting one I could be giving to someone else, or at least eating in its final form. (Of course, I have cherries from last Wednesday that are already liquefied, but I have to do quality control on every batch, you know.)

In the interest of tracking how quickly the invertase liquefies the fondant, I decided to dissect and photograph them before taste testing each day.

After (not quite) twenty-four hours, the invertase and cherry juice have converted the fondant immediately around the cherry to liquid, but most of the fondant is still firm and attached to the chocolate coating.

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 1

Chocolate Covered Cherries, Part 1 is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

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Heading into my senior year in college, my mom and I realized that I was going to most likely be moving not just across town but out of town after graduation and my wedding the next summer, ending the days of having just a short trip on the freeway between us. I'd been getting more and more interested in cooking since the trip we took together to Turkey two years before that, and we both wanted to learn to decorate cakes, so we ended up enrolling in the beginning Wilton classes. And so I started down the path toward pastry school, elbow-deep in Crisco-based frosting in the back room of the local gigantic craft store.

I'm not entirely sure what prompted it, but that Christmas I became obsessed with making fancy little candies for everyone's presents. Most of them are not so fancy in retrospect, utilizing grocery store coating chocolate and far too much sugar, but then and now the crown jewel of it all was the chocolate-covered cherry. I actually used real chocolate to coat those. I didn't know anything about tempering chocolate then, so they were soon covered in blooming cocoa butter (not that I even knew that was the problem), but they still tasted delicious. Ever year since, I've intended to make them again--and make them right this time, with tempered chocolate and invertase (the enzyme used in commercial cherries to make the centers liquefy)--but even when I've acquired the required cherries, they haven't gotten made.

This year, things were going to be different. This year I lined up a cherry-candying buddy, sort of like a workout buddy but more fattening. Geeky Gnu and I made plans to get together and make them as soon as the invertase showed up. We had to wait a bit longer than we liked on account of the fact that Chef Rubber was waiting for the invertase to be made, but it finally showed up on Tuesday. I was feeling lazy earlier in the week, but fortunately I was talked into making the cherries on Wednesday night rather than Thursday night, which was good because the difference between the two was seven inches of snow.

Part of doing things right this time was finding a recipe that called specifically for the invertase, rather than just adding a few drops of the stuff to the one from Woman's Day I'd gotten off of the internet all those years ago. I found some hopeful-looking info by searching eGullet, but as of Wednesday afternoon I still didn't have a recipe in hand. I was wandering through Barnes and Noble, picking up a couple of presents I'd waited too long to order off of Amazon, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the book I've been looking for all my life, standing there on B&N's prominent cookbook display: Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner.

It had a recipe for fondant--the confectioner's sort, not the kind you peel off of wedding cakes before eating them. It had a full explanation of invertase and how to use it. It had all sorts of technical information about chocolate and sugar I didn't have memorized yet.

It came home with me. I couldn't resist.

After a quick perusal of the pertinent pages, I drained the cherries, reserving the juice, and set about lining them up to dry on cooling racks padded with a double layer of paper towel to absorb the juice. A lot of recipes recommend doing this the night before, but we had to be somewhat flexible dependent on the weather.

A couple quick facts for calculating recipe size:
- Average number of cherries per 36 oz. jar (Star brand, from a two-pack bought at Costco): 73.25
- Average number of wasted cherries per a jar due to missing stems: 6

Once Geeky showed up, we started in on a half batch of the fondant recipe in my beautiful shiny new book. The general idea is to take five parts sugar, one part glucose syrup, and one part water and bring them to a boil while stirring constantly. Since I was approaching this whole fondant thing with a teensy-weensy bit too much confidence, I figured I'd go right ahead and substitute the cherry juice for the water in the recipe without bothering to do any boring math to keep the ratio of sugar and water in line. Whether or not this contributed to some of our later troubles, I can't say. I can say with certainty that it turned the fondant a fairy-tale shade of pink that made the dipped cherries look like a smooth, shimmery bonbon out of a computer-generated cartoon. There's a certain magic to dipping these cherries that makes you not care about the evils of artificial redness.

Once the syrup is boiling, we quit stirring (okay, maybe there was a little forgetfulness in play here and it took awhile before we figured out we were supposed to stop) and cooked the syrup to 243° F (it may have gotten a little higher than that before we got it out of the pot).

Next, we poured it out onto my woefully small marble slab. The directions say to sprinkle cold water on the marble first and then also on top of the sugar; we managed to sprinkle it on top of the sugar, which started spilling toward the edge of the too-small marble due to the fact that I set it down on the one part of our counter that our discount granite guys didn't install anywhere near level.

The action didn't stop once we had that under control. We let the sugar cool to 120° F, more or less, and then began the process of agitating it into crystallizing by scraping it back and forth on the marble, much like one would do with chocolate only much, much more of a pain since chocolate flows and sugar sticks and holds on like the marble is the last life preserver on the Titanic. This required a lot more strength than I was anticipating, so I mostly tried to hold the marble in place and scrape the sugar off the main scraper with a metal bench scraper.

The book says this step should take twenty (very long) minutes for the fondant to fully crystallize, "turning into a short-textured mass." Twenty minutes came and went without the fondant changing from its consistency of a very gooey, sticky cousin of pulled sugar, even as it became tougher and tougher to scrape.

Finally, we resorted to scraping it entirely off the marble and pulling it like it actually was pulled sugar. This helped...to a point. We never got that short-textured mass, but after awhile it did take on more of a...well, I wouldn't say it got any less shiny, but the inside of the mass looked more and more matte somehow, and thus seemed to be fairly well crystallized.

The next step in the directions is to allow the fondant to rest overnight, but we didn't have overnight, so we went straight to dipping the cherries.

To coat the cherries, we heated the fondant over a water bath to 160° F, thinned it a little with some more of the cherry juice (the recipe suggests brandy), and added 1/4 tsp of invertase just before dipping.

Once all of that was accomplished, the dipping went very easily. Keeping the bowl over the water bath (with the gas turned down to the lowest setting) kept the fondant thin enough to coat the cherries without too much trouble. As each one was coated, we let them drip over the bowl, removed the extra fondant hanging from the bottom with the edge of a wooden spoon, and set them to cool on a sheet pan covered with a Silpat.

I don't think anyone who was there could get over how pretty they looked. I really wanted to leave them like that...only the invertase would have left all of that shiny pink sugar in a puddle around the cherry after a day or two. We did give into temptation and try a couple of misshapen and stemless cherries that way, though, and as pretty as the pink ones are, they're much better with the chocolate. So that makes up for having to cover up the sugar coating.

One thing we didn't learn until later was that it's better not to let the fondant coat the stem as well as the cherry. Coating the stem gives the invertase-laced fondant an express lane to the open air, along which it can ooze out and drip all over the chocolate.

Because we only made a half batch of the fondant--enough for about a quarter of the cherries I had drained and dried for us--I made some of the home-style "fondant" I had used the first time I made the cherries and had a couple of helpers cover them with me while Geeky dipped the other cherries in the real fondant. The recipe itself is very straightforward and my only addition to it was 1/2 tsp of invertase, so I won't get into detail on that, but I have a tip or two about how to get it onto the cherries in a smooth and even fashion.

The main trick is to dust your hands/latex gloves with enough powdered sugar that the "fondant" remains dry as you roll. Also, using a smaller piece than you think you need to cover the cherry and squishing it to fit helps avoid making big, clunky-looking cherries. Once you have the cherry covered, put it between your hands with the stem sticking out between the middle and index fingers of your dominant hand. Roll the cherry very quickly and very lightly, around and around. This should make the top and bottom of the cherry smooth, but make the middle stick out, so turn the cherry so the stem pokes out toward you (between your thumbs) and roll it again, still quickly and lightly. Finally, roll it around sort of every which way in your palms to smooth it all over, once again quickly and lightly.

I emphasize the quickly and lightly part because the less pressure you put on the cherry, the rounder and nicer it will look. All of that should take 30 seconds at the most--the quicker you do it, the lighter your touch is likely to be. Hopefully.



The next step is, of course, actually dipping the cherries in chocolate, which will be the subject of the next (hopefully shorter) post. But see what I mean about cartoon bonbons? I love that pink fondant.

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 2

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Cranberry Meringue Tart

Cranberry Meringue Tart is now hosted at Pie of the Tiger

Ever since I first saw the picture of the cute little Mini Cranberry Meringue Pies in Martha Stewart Living a couple years ago, I've wanted to make them. Their photo showed one sliced down the middle, exposing the jewel-like filling and the lightness of the meringue to full effect. I never got around to it, but this year I decided to try all new recipes for Thanksgiving, and this went to the top of my list.

I made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes like forgetting the egg in the citrus pate sucree (I put it to the left of the food processor and the rest of my mise en place to the right) and experimenting with a store-bought carton of egg whites for the meringue when I didn't have time to make a second batch. However, even without that egg, the pate sucree was possibly the best tart crust I've ever made, and several people complimented it. It uses both lemon and orange zest, a flavor combination that I used in my wedding cake years ago that really seemed to punch up the flavor.

But there was no blessing in disguise in regards to the meringue, unless I count the reminder that things never go well when I try to cut corners. At least this time it was in the spirit of experimentation and not just out of laziness, as usual. I used the Trader Joe's 100% egg whites, and I knew that they weren't going to be ideal when I saw how cloudy they were, but I went ahead and made the meringue. The foam ended up looking, well, very insipid and watery, not the airy dollop of heaven that I wanted to recreate from the magazine. By the time I was done, there was no time left, so the mediocre meringue went on the tart and I did my best to torch it, even though it didn't want to brown properly.

Despite all of that, I don't think I've ever had a dessert disappear so quickly at a big family event or gotten quite so many compliments and questions. I kept being surprised that people liked it, because I wasn't entirely pleased with the mouth feel of the cranberry filling, as pretty as it was. It had that gross texture that comes from too much cornstarch, so next time I make this I'll either decrease the cornstarch or experiment with some of the alternate thickners my husband has been playing with in his attempts at molecular gastronomy, now that we have a kitchen that we can actually cook in again. The xanthan gum marshmallows he made last week were a huge success, so I'm reading up on hydrocolloides now, too.

As I said above, I picked out a number of new holiday recipes to try this year. When I ate meat, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays, and I've been trying to recreate that experience in a vegetarian way for eight years now, with varying amounts of success. This year, though, inspired by the new kitchen, I decided to try to find some new flavors to turn into new traditions, rather than continue to try to recreate the omnivore's version of the holiday. Pretty much all of them (other than a new twist on the savory seitan and mushroom dish I've come up with to stand in for turkey) came from Martha Stewart--I rarely turn to her during the rest of the year, but the recipes in the holiday issues of the magazine are always really appealing to me, so much so that I keep them in their own binder on my cookbook shelf.

Cauliflower Gratin with Endive was delicious--cheesy without being greasy at all, and the Israeli couscous scattered in the bottom of the pan absorbed the sauce but held its shape in a texturally interesting way.

Stuffing was always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, so it took a lot strength to turn my back on the plain old crouton, celery and sage type stuff we always had. The Cornbread, Wild Mushroom and Pecan Stuffing I settled on was so good I just wanted to hold it on my tongue and not swallow it, or even chew it.

We used maitake, hedgehog and oyster mushrooms--I'd never cooked with hedgehog mushrooms, and they were extremely tasty!--so it wasn't inexpensive. Otherwise, I would've made another pan straight away and wolfed it down at home. I have plans to try it with less expensive mushrooms soon. The pecans were a revelation. I've often put walnuts into savory cooking, but I think this was my first time using pecans that way, and they complemented the mushrooms very well.

It seems like we made another new dish, but I can't think of what it was, other than the seitan stuff, where the newness of it lay mostly in my husband's interpretation of how to cook it based on my instructions I yelled from the shower. That and he tried a trick for quickly browning onions by adding baking soda to them that he read about somewhere online. It worked. But it also made the onions completely dissolve...which had the effect of coating the seitan in the onion pulp and frying it onto it. Not what we were going for, but I think I'll do it again next time we make it.