Author: KC

I'm a graduate student in Montreal. I spend most of my time studying drug addiction using brain imaging techniques. I'm also a foodie, exploring the culinary world both in and out of my kitchen.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

139. “La Brea Tar Pit” Chicken Wings p.55


The recipe

I’m really ambivalent about this recipe. My wings were delicious, but the recipe is horrible. Basically you combine soy, red wine, sugar, and ginger and bring it to a boil, then pour it over chicken wings in a roasting pan and bake at 400 for 45 minutes, flip them, and cook for another hour-ish. It’s supposed to result in a thick, tar-like coating for the wings. It actually starts to burn about half an hour into the cooking and completely ruins a baking sheet. I’m not the only one to have run into this problem, the Epicurious comments are full of complaints. However the author of this recipe, Metta Miller, wrote on the boards as well. She says

Hello all, Sorry our kitchen whiz north of the border found these to be vile. If you follow my original instructions (Gourmet altered the recipe) they will be delicious every time…..To the salt sensitive: Use low-sodium soy sauce. To those concerned about burnt pans/sauce: Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes; turn and check after another 30-45 minutes. I’ve been making these wings this way for years and haven’t ended up with a single ruined pan — or a single complaint — yet. Good luck!

The recipe as written in The Book is atrocious. The cooking time is way too long, and it’s too hot. The soy-wine-sugar-ginger sauce set up into a lava-rock like caramel that wouldn’t come off my pan despite soaking, scrubbing, vinegar, steel wool, and boiling water. It was also giving off huge volumes of black sticky smoke, and set off the fire alarm.

I was convinced the wings were ruined, but I pulled them out and transfered them to another baking dish. I scraped up the sauce that hadn’t burnt, and diluted it with water, then stuck the wings and sauce back into the oven at a lower temperature, and periodically added more water. After about an hour and half total cooking time the wings were tender with a nice crispy exterior.

I was using some very nice free range chicken wings, which make a huge difference. I’m not in a position to eat free range chicken all the time, but free range wings are cheap, and it makes a world of difference. They’re so much meatier and more flavourful than the other kind. The sauce was probably quite different from what the book intended, because I lost more than half of it, and kept diluting what remained, it never thickened or resembled a tar pit. It ended up as a nice caramelized glaze, with wonderful flavour. The wine worked with the soy and ginger remarkably well. I was surprised that they didn’t particularly taste like Chinese chicken wings, they were just delicious, in fact they were among the best wings I’ve ever had. They were certainly salty enough, and I’m willing to bet that the fully sauced version would have been inedibly salty, I’d definitely follow the authors low-sodium soy recommendation.

I absolutely believe that Metta Miller’s original version of this recipe makes some fantastic wings, and the wings I managed to salvage from this debacle of a recipe were delightful. However the recipe itself is inexcusable. If I was in a more charitable mood I might have considered the potential of the recipe to be great, but I’m feeling spiteful. This recipe ruined one of my favorite baking sheets, and that’s a transgression I’ll not soon forget. If I’d continued to follow the recipe as written it would not have resulted in food, and there’s only one possible rating for not-food. “La Brea Tar Pit” Chicken Wings have earned the first zero mushroom rating of the project.

Categories
The Project

Great News


Now that we’ve had a chance to tell close friends in person, I can tell you wonderful people who follow The Project, that my dining companion has agreed to become my wife. I proposed on New Year’s Eve up in the mountains, at the ski cabin we were staying in. We were about to sit down to a beef tenderloin feast her father had spent the afternoon preparing, and I pulled her out onto the balcony and proposed. After establishing that, yes I was serious, and no, this wasn’t a joke, she said yes.

Categories
Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings The Book

138. Macaroni and Cheese p.223


The recipe

I haven’t eaten all that much macaroni and cheese since I graduated to shoes with laces, but most of the kids I knew, and the stoners they grew up to be, loved the stuff from the box. As a child, macaroni and cheese was just the brand neutral way of saying your mom was making Kraft Dinner. I decided that KD was not for me around age 5, and looked for creative ways to avoid it, or mask its flavour. For reference, cut up hot dogs made it better, ketchup made it worse. Unfortunately kids in Montreal ate a lot of KD in the ’80s. My mom accepted my quirks and stopped serving it to me, but I still ate a lot of it at friends houses.

I was well pleased to leave mac and cheese behind me by the time I reached high school, and it stayed that way ’till a a nice Southern girl introduced me to the home made version in my early 20’s. Her macaroni and cheese was an entirely different animal, using real cheese, building flavour and texture with a roux, adding a touch of heat, and baking the whole thing with some extra cheese on top. I came around, and macaroni and cheese became something worth looking forward to.

I started experimenting with my own versions of mac and cheese, without much success. The problem I was trying to solve was that M&C is inherently rich, bland, and straightforward. Some people interpret that as a food surrogate for mother’s love, but I find it a bit dull. I tried adding herbs to the M&C, which fubared it, adding more chili flakes didn’t help either. One version with chipotles was actually pretty good, and worth revisiting sometime. Drawing on my childhood hot dog experience, I tried adding some slices of merguez, which worked quite well. These experiments brought me closer to what I was looking for, but they were still lacking. I was happy to discover that Gourmet has hit upon secret elixir that cuts the richness, and ties everything together, Dijon mustard. The Book’s version isn’t perfect, but I’m immensely grateful to it for bringing me closer to the ultimate macaroni and cheese recipe.

In this version, you make a three minute roux with butter, flour, and red pepper flakes, then whisk in milk and bring the sauce to a boil. After letting it boil for a few minutes, cream, extra-sharp Cheddar, and Dijon are added. The sauce is then added to cooked macaroni, and some of the water from the pot in a baking dish, then topped with mixture of butter, panko bread crumbs, and more cheese. The casserole goes into the oven for around half an hour, and then served.

The mustard and red pepper flakes make all the difference, and prevent this from being just too rich to be enjoyable. Getting the cheese right is important too. The recipe calls for extra-sharp Cheddar, which seems simple, but even an average grocery store will have about ten different versions, ranging from the plastic packaged stuff sold along with the milk, to fancy-pants imported stuff at the cheese counter. You can spend a fortune on truly wonderful Cheddar, but it’s probably a waste of money to go melting that into mac and cheese. The low end rubbery stuff will be OK, but not as good as it could be. The cheese really carries this dish so spending a bit more on a nice piece of aged local Cheddar is a worthwhile investment.

The recipe calls for panko, or other dried bread crumbs. I couldn’t get my hands on any panko, so I went with bread crumbs from the bakery down the street. Panko are known for their lightness and texture, while my bread crumbs were quite finely ground and dense. The 2 cups of panko the recipe called for might have been a nice topping, but 2 cups of my bread crumbs probably weighed twice as much as panko did. The macaroni was just too heavy on the topping, and the very dry bread crumbs sucked up a huge amount of moisture, so that within about 20 minutes of taking the dish out of the oven, the macaroni had set up, and lost the saucy-runny aspect you’re looking for in macaroni and cheese. You can see from the photo that it was next to impossible to find any of the macaroni under all the topping.

I think this recipe did a very nice job with the macaroni and sauce aspects, but fell short with the topping. I can’t comment on how it would have been with panko, but while they gave regular bread crumbs as an acceptable alternative, it obviously wasn’t. Beyond the topping, it was probably the best macaroni and cheese I’ve ever had. I’m sure that just a little tweaking could result in a truly great macaroni and cheese dinner, for the adults as well as the kids.

Categories
The Book Vegetables

137. Ratatouille p.586


The recipe

Everyone, or at least everyone who cares about food, has a stockpile of formative food memories, often centred on parents and grandparents doing things the way they’d always been done, or traveling experiences where the zeitgeist of your food universe is overturned by a brand new culture. The list of culinary luminaries who trace their food awakenings back to a summer trip to France is longer than I’d care to count. So it should come as no surprise that my thirteen year old self came home from a month long stay with a family near Lyons with a different perspective on food, and in particular ratatouille.

I don’t think I took nearly as much advantage of my time there as I should have, I mostly sulked, pittied myself, and felt homesick. I was an awful house guest, and I was convinced I was being punished. But, my hosts graciously put up with this insufferable Canadian brat, and exposed me to some wonderful things that I wasn’t ready to appreciate. Fifteen years later I can still taste most of the meals we ate, and the idea of staying in a four hundred year old farm house, surrounded by rolling pastures, creaky old barns, and tiny streams sounds wonderful. I wish I could go back and gather snails off the rocks in the field after a rain for escargot in garlic butter, and the weekly farmers market wouldn’t seem like the painful drudgery it did at the time. I owe that family a huge debt of gratitude, and an apology.

I did appreciate most of the food experiences at the time, the rich creamy yogurt was unlike anything I’d ever eaten, the impeccably cured sausages were a revelation, and of course the cheese. I also started to come around on very rare steak. The biggest change was the idea that vegetables could good enough to crave, and not just an afterthought to be gotten out of if at all possible. Ratatouille was the catalyst for that change. A nice older couple who had helped to organize my trip invited us over for lunch in the back garden, where we ate ratatouille, baguette, and nibbled on olives. At first I was puzzled by the lack of a meaty main course, but soon I couldn’t have cared less. The ratatouille was unbelievably good, and I just couldn’t understand why. My mother had made it before, and I was way to smart to fall for her hiding veggies in a stew trickery, so I turned my nose up at it. But this ratatouille was a completely different being, it was insanely flavourful, and multi layered with each element distinct, but contributing to the whole. There were tomatoes, garlic, peppers, onions, zucchini, eggplant, that were more fresh and explosively flavourful than I could ever have conceived of them being. That meal filled me with a sense of profound contentment, connectedness, and peace. Thinking back that euphoria probably had a lot more to do with the Champagne and Beaujolais they let me drink, but one way or another my perspective on ratatouille had been changed. I asked the old man what the secret was, and he told me about herbs de provence, so I brought a big bag home to try to get my mother to recreate it. Of course, my mother had herbs de provence, the secret was really in the incredible produce that went into the stew, and a lifetime spent honing the technique ’till his ratatouille was as good as it could be.

The Book’s ratatouille doesn’t live up to the old man’s, but it at least recalls it. The Book uses a very odd method, the recipe starts by making the tomato sauce with peeled (I didn’t bother) seeded and chopped tomatoes, sliced garlic, parsley, and basil leaves. While the sauce simmers, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, and eggplant are individually browned, then added to the tomato sauce and allowed to simmer for an hour. This batch browning of the veggies does a nice job building flavour, but it’s a huge pain, and it takes a whole whack of oil. I liked the added complexity, but there really was much more oil than necessary. I think you could get a similar effect by tossing the veggies with a more reasonable amount of oil and spreading them on cookie sheets and running them under the broiler for a few minutes. I was also surprised by the lack of herbs de provence, usually that herb blend is de rigueur for ratatouille. The basil only strategy turned out to be quite delicious, but I did miss the other flavours. My favorite ratatouilles have quite distinct chunks of vegetables, which retain some of their original texture, while softening into a cohesive blend with the others. Here, everything got a bit too soft, and I wonder if it wouldn’t have worked better to simmer it for less time, but let it sit in the fridge for a day or two before serving it.

I made this ratatouille twice within a few weeks. I was very well pleased with my first attempt, and decided to bring a second batch to a large family affair. The second attempt just didn’t live up to the first one, and I can’t explain why. The first batch went over pretty well with my dining companion, and some friends I served it to, but the second was largely ignored at dinner. That inconsistency is kind of worrying to me, I have no clue what factors I varied in my second attempt, but it just didn’t have that special something. My first try was very good, and could have been excellent with a few tweaks, however the inexplicably mediocre second attempt will keep me from giving this a great rating.

Categories
Soups The Book

136. Mushroom Barley Soup p.113


The recipe

This soup suffers from a serious branding issue. If it had been billed as barely soupy barley stew, with extra barley, some carrots, and hardly any mushrooms at all, I would have known what I was getting into. The blurb for the recipe talks about all the contrasting mushroom flavours and blah blah blah, but I really had to do some food styling to get any mushrooms in the photo at all. I picked this recipe because I wanted a mushroom soup, and I was looking forward to a little added body from the barley, and a nice background of aromatics. I ended up with a perfectly OK barley stew that I wasn’t at all in the mood for.

The recipe starts by browning garlic and onion in a large pot, then adding sliced white mushrooms, soaked and sliced shiitake’s, soy sauce, cooking out the liquid, then adding sherry and evaporating that too. The liquid is then added in the form of chicken stock, water, and the mushroom soaking liquid. The barley, carrots, and dried thyme and rosemary are added and the soup simmers for an hour. When it’s ready it’s seasoned with salt and pepper, and some parsley is stirred in just before serving.

The texture was very thick and hearty, with most of the flavour coming from the chicken stock and aromatics. It actually tasted a whole lot like my mom’s beef and barley soup, but without the deep beef stock and hearty chunks of meat that made that a satisfying winter lunch. The chicken stock left it tasting thin and whimpy, and seriously overpowered by the mushy barley texture. I should reiterate that for a mushroom barley soup, mushrooms were not a flavour consideration.

Unfortunately this soup was in a rotten in between spot. With less barley and four times more mushrooms it could have been the nice mushroom soup it advertised itself as, or using a more concentrated stock, and adding rich chunks of meat, could have resulted in a thick barely stew worth eating. As it was, it was perfectly edible, but nothing to look forward to.

Categories
The Project

Winter Vacation

Happy Holidays,

After great visits with family and friends over the past few days, I’m heading off to the airport to join my dining companion and her family for a ski vacation. I’ll have plenty of time to relax and write about food, but only sporadic internet access. Look for updates in batches between here and Jan 8th.

During last year’s ski getaway my dining companion’s family asked me to cook something, and this is what I did.

wish me better luck this time around!

All the best to you and yours,

KC

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

135. Green Mayonnaise p.887


The recipe

This mayo is meant to accompany the Poached Salmon in Aspic. I wasn’t quite sure why an aspic covered fish, served with aspic on the side, needed a mayonnaise as well. My guests didn’t eat much of this mayo with the salmon, possibly because I didn’t make it obvious enough that they were meant to be served together, but I suspect it was because no one really felt it was lacking in mayo. If it had just been a poached salmon, a nice sauce would be appreciated, but it seemed out of place with the aspic.

The recipe is dead simple. I started with a cup of yesterday’s recipe for plain mayonnaise. I ran parsley, chives, tarragon, and dill through the food processor with lemon juice and half the mayo. I omitted the optional chervil. Once it was smooth, I added the rest of the mayo, and stuck it in the fridge to come together for a couple of hours.

It tasted very much like mayonnaise with a bunch of herbs puréed into it. Fresh herbs are almost always nice, and they added all sorts of flavour to the mayo. Tarragon and dill aren’t subtle, so it was fairly bold. The additional lemon juice and water from the herbs thinned it out a lot, so it was more of a drizzling than a spreading mayo. As I said, it didn’t do much for the salmon, so I was left with a lot of this. I couldn’t really think of many other uses though. I tried sandwiches, I tried serving it with grilled chicken, and I put some on asparagus. In all cases it was just fine, but I would have preferred plain old mayo, or perhaps an aïoli. Simply grilled or poached fish would be a natural use for this, which I wouldn’t mind trying it at some point, and if it were thicker it could be quite interesting with French fries.

I’m sure there’s a dish out there just begging for a drizzle of green mayonnaise, but I haven’t found it yet.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

134. Mayonnaise p.886


Surprisingly there’s no recipe on Epicurious for plain old mayonnaise.

This is The Book’s basic mayonnaise recipe, there are 7 other dressed up mayonnaises which use this recipe as a starting point, so I’ll be making it a bunch of times. As with most of the basic recipes in the book, it’s solid, but not exciting. However, that’s not a bad thing. I made the mayo recipe from the ’76 edition of The Joy of Cooking, and it was a disaster. Joy is often considered the home cook’s go to source for no-fail basic recipes, and you’d think they’d have a rock solid mayo method, but no. Mayonnaise is made by whisking an egg yolk with oil a drop at a time to get an emulsion started, then pouring in a staggering amount of oil in a slow stream while whisking madly. Once the mayo is thickened and the emulsion is no longer at risk of breaking, you can add extra flavourings. The crazy Joy method would have you add mustard, salt, cayenne, lemon juice, and confectioners sugar before you start the emulsion at all. The mustard is a common addition because it helps the emulsion form, but adding the lemon juice is just stupidity. The acid fights the emulsion you’re working so hard to build, why would you put it in there? I whisked for about 20 minutes before I could get a thin soupy consistency. It was an OK salad dressing, but a horrific mayo. The Book’s method is much more logical, and worked very well.

In this recipe an egg yolk is whisked together with Dijon and salt, then 3/4 of a cup of oil are added first by drops then in a slow stream. Once the mixture starts to thicken to the point that it’s getting difficult to whisk, and the emulsion is solid, you add a bit of white wine vinegar, and lemon juice. Then the remainder of the oil is added in a stream, and salt and white pepper are stirred in.

The mayo wasn’t quite as thick as I would have liked. You’d be better applying this with a spoon than a knife. But, it was silky smooth, and nicely glossy. I might have cut 1/2 a teaspoon of liquid somewhere to keep the mayo thicker. The flavour was pretty good, it had the eggy richness I look for in a mayonnaise, with a little bite from the vinegar and lemon juice, and a background body from the mustard. It was very nice spread on a sandwich, and quite a bit better than the the stuff that comes from a jar.

My only real complaint was the instruction to use either olive oil or vegetable oil in the recipe without further specification. Depending on your olive oil it can have a very pronounced taste, which is great for some applications, but it can make for a very weirdly flavoured mayonnaise. I made mayo at my brother’s place a few weeks back, and the only oil he had was olive, that mayo was edible, but none of us liked it much. It lacked the  mellow feeling I’m looking for in mayo, all of those grassy spicy flavours I enjoy in good olive oil where just unpleasant and distracting when they were so amplified. If you’re going to use all olive oil, I’d recommend using very mildly flavoured oil, preferably not extra virgin. I think the best tactic is to use a small amount of good olive oil for flavour, and then use a flavourless oil for the rest of it (canola, or grapeseed would be my first choices, using about 1 part olive oil to 3 parts other oil).

Mayonnaise is quite easy to make, and homemade has a definite edge over the store bought kind. I’ve always been disturbed by the fact that Hellman’s is made with real eggs, but keeps for months. Without all of the shelf-stable preservatives this mayo will only keep for two days. Since it’s really not much trouble to make, and it tastes better than the miracles of food science on the grocery shelf, I’ve been getting into the habit of making my own. This recipe uses a solid method, and it’s a jumping off point for a lot of interesting variations. It won’t blow your mind, and I’ve had better homemade mayo, but it’s worth trying at least once.

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

133. Poached Salmon in Aspic p.318


The recipe

I had so much fun making and presenting this, that even if it been inedible, it would have been worth it. Luckily, it tasted quite good. I absolutely knew that I needed an occasion to serve this dish. In honour of the aspic coated days of yore we organized a retro-potluck extravaganza. People brought cheese balls, bean casseroles, cocktail weenies, deviled eggs, mac and cheese, potato salad, and old fashioned cocktails. Then I brought out a cold fish covered in salmon flavoured Jello. Most people weren’t too sure what to make of it, but it certainly caused a stir.

For people who’ve been following along for a while now, it should be clear that I have an abiding affection for old-school, kind of nasty, but kind of great, dishes. For me this is the ne plus ultra of that style of cooking. It’s got the pressed linen and polished silver grandeur of days gone by, as well as a gross out, dare your friends to eat it, backwardness. I’ve been thinking about trying a salmon in aspic for a couple of years, but after an enlightening conversation with my dining companion’s mother, in which I accused her grandmother of having been a great aspicker, I was determined.

The recipe was quite involved, and time consuming. I started by poaching the salmon in water, with lemon, onion, carrot, celery, bay leaf, parsley stems, thyme, and peppercorns. Then whole poacher went into the fridge for 8 hours to let the flavours infuse. The recipe calls for a 24-inch fish poacher, which I don’t have. The biggest one I could borrow was 19 inches, so I used a smaller Atlantic salmon (4 lbs instead of 6).

Once the fish is chilled, it’s removed to a cookie sheet, and the broth is strained, fortified with white wine, Madeira, thyme, and salt, then reduced. Meanwhile the most painstaking part of recipe begins, the removing of the nasty bits of salmon. Beyond a little trimming of excess bones, and floppy fatty folds, it involves peeling all the skin and dark flesh off the fish. It’s an easy instruction to read, but a delicate and painstaking job.

Once the broth is reduced, it gets a further addition of leek, carrot, celery, egg whites, and crushed up egg shells, and gently simmered. You’re basically making a fish consommé in this step, using the egg whites and shells to trap little particles in the protein net they form, all the nastiness forms a raft at the top, and once you run the broth through a couple of layers of paper towel you end up with a crystal clear broth. This is one of those incredibly simple cooking techniques, that’s undeniably cool. People were going nuts about using gelatin filtration to make unusually flavored consommés a couple of months back, but making the original had its own charms.

The reduced and perfectly clear broth is then added to some bloomed gelatin, and allowed to simmer for a couple of minutes ’till everything is dissolved. The mixture is then chilled in a metal bowl, sitting in a water bath ’till the gelatin just begins to set. Then it’s time to work quickly and get the aspic over the fish. I’ve read more than a few aspic disaster stories, of the gelatin just sliding off its target, or clumping up unattractively. So I was a bit worried about this step, but it worked flawlessly. I spooned on a thin layer, chilled the fish for a while, then topped it with some blanched leeks, and applied another layer of gelatin. All of the remaining aspic went into a baking dish and was allowed to set. I then cut it up and surrounded the fish with little wiggly aspic cubes.

The whole point of covering a salmon in aspic is to keep it moist. Obviously the aspic adds flavour, and texture, but really it’s all about protecting the fish for a banquet presentation. I have to say it did a very good job on that front. The salmon was quite delicious, mild and delicate. For all the aromatics that went into this, nothing overwhelmed. It was more of a subtle background array of flavours. The aspic had a much more concentrated dose of flavour, and I was surprised to like it quite a bit. I wouldn’t sit down to a bowl of aspic, but it had a rich mouth-feel that complimented the salmon, and added little highlights of flavour

It was quite warm the night I served this dish, and we packed about 35 people into our apartment, so it got intolerably hot. Unfortunately the aspic didn’t hold up well under the heat, and mostly melted off my fish within about 15 minutes. Those who got an early serving tried it as it was meant to be, but latecomers only tried poached salmon in Jello soup. I suppose if you were doing this professionally you’d put your serving dish on a bed of crushed ice, but our ice supply was devoted to mixing old-fashioneds, martinis, and Singapore slings.

I was really happy with this dish, from a showmanship perspective this was absolutely worth it. The flavour was very nice, but it couldn’t live up to my expectations for such a dramatic looking dish. It was very mild, and pleasant, which for a crowd pleasing buffet is exactly what you’re looking for. I’m impressed that the recipe is as clearly written and step-by-step easy to follow as it is. I was very afraid going in that this would turn out to be a spectacular failure, but it couldn’t have gone more smoothly. If you’ve ever considered doing something like this, I’d definitely recommend going for it. It was an excellent experience, worthy of a five mushroom rating.

Categories
Breakfast and Brunch The Book

132. Blueberry Muffins p.641


The recipe

My dining companion has been doing a lot of driving for work over the past few months, and I’ve been looking for little treats that travel well to send along with her. These muffins looked like they’d fit the bill, and I was pleased to discover that they’re not just portable, they’re tasty. They’ve got another of Ruth’s seemingly unnecessary streusel toppings, but that’s not such a bad thing.

The recipe follows the standard muffin method, mix the wet stuff together, mix the dry stuff together, add the wet stuff to the dry stuff, and mix until it’s barely combined. In this case the wet stuff is played by melted butter, whole milk, egg, egg yolk, and vanilla, while the roles of the dry stuff are capably portrayed by flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Once the muffin mixture is together, the blueberries are delicately folded in, and the batter is divided into muffin cups. It then gets topped with a shortbread like mixture of flour, butter, and sugar. The muffins bake at 375 for 18 – 20 minutes.

The muffins were very simply flavoured, rich and moist, with a carefully balanced sweetness that enhanced the blueberries. I like to give credit where credit is due, and this is one baked good where The Book got the sugar right. The topping was less successful, the recipe says to bake the muffins ’till they’re golden and crisp, but they were cooked through, and smelling done before the topping changed colour. If I’d waited any longer the undersides would have burned. I think there was just too much topping, so it was left a bit raw looking. It tasted quite good, but wasn’t as visually appealing as I would have liked.

This recipe gets nearly everything right, good texture, clean flavours, satisfying richness, and a wallop of blueberry essence. Unfortunately the undercooked topping takes away from the effect. I’d certainly make these again, but I’d use half the topping, or omit it entirely. It did lend a nice contrasting texture, but the “studies in white, number 6” vibe didn’t do it for me. Overall quite a nice muffin though.