Icing comparison

The rotten little kid in the orange shirt should be excluded from all future comparisons. Notice they stopped showing his opinion. While on the website where this was featured his ratings still counted.

The icing that Mum made was a little bit of milk, vanilla extract and confectioner's sugar. It was applied thinly and hardened to a crust. I used it to smear fingernails onto finger-shaped peanut butter cookies. Flavored with almond extract. Every single person who ate one of those fingers, started nibbling at the tip of the fingernail that overhung just a bit.  

I'm ready to make peach-shaped cupcakes for the ladies I know around here. The icing I'll use to weld together two hemispheric cupcakes is 1/2 Philadelphia cream cheese and  1/2 butter whipped with peach liquor and confectioner's sugar, dash of salt.  It applies as soft and fluffy but hardens when chilled, as both butter an cream cheese do.

I experimented with two ideas for the cupcakes.

I keep hearing on television from cooks who say that baking is scientific and whereas they do what they wish as cook, they fail at baking because they cannot be so scientifically precise and obedient to rules.

But I find that not true. 

I didn't use recipes. I used what I learned from other recipes, and I learned the recipes vary widly, and applied what I wanted, what I felt was needed. When I felt I needed more flour then I added it. When I felt I needed to skip milk and use peach puree instead, I switched them. I switched out vanilla extract and used peach liquor instead.  I prepared a volume of mixture for cheesecake style cupcakes then used only half of the volume because I felt so much flavor base and cream cheese goes with how much egg white from four eggs. 

The cheese cake version failed as round imitation peaches. Too wrinkly once they compressed, not hemispherical. But they sure were delicious. Good Lord, those were good. I at all six wrinkled hemispheres. It's only less than one egg white and about a tablespoon of cheesecake flavor base blended in.

The cake versions are delicious as well. The volume is based on two eggs and 12 pieces of tinned peaches pureed. That turns out to fill 12 hemispheres. I'm guessing. Because half of that volume filled six hemispheric cups. They are made with low-protein flour, tinned peaches and peach liquor. They are light, fluffy, sturdy and compellingly delicious. They're excellent with the peach frosting smeared on them, and excellent with any kind of preserves smeared on them, and excellent plain with coffee. 

A guy could get quite fat testing these things. 

I'm ready for Monday to spring these things on people.

But I haven't decided what leaf to use. We had a peach tree in Louisiana that produced craptastic pathetic hard little useless peaches. We didn't know what we were doing. A tiny orchard, actually, about a dozen small trees at the back of the property next to a giant pecan tree. Peach trees have lanceolate leaves. It's a word. It means shaped like a lance. And a lance is a steel-tipped spear.  Mint has cordate shaped leaves, somewhat heart shaped. So they don't match with peaches. Basil has leaves shaped more closely to peach leaves, but mint goes with peaches better than basil does. I just might use basil leaves, even though mint is better culinarily. Still, I bet peaches and basil would be pretty good. I don't really care. They're only there for subterfuge anyway. 

The ladies are going to love these. Straight out of the oven, but cooled. I already know they taste really good. Really really good. Seriously good.

I imagine you could do the same thing with any fruit or any berry. Enhance it with its own type of liquor. I used banana liquor to pump up the banana flavor and that works very well. I thought back then, I bet this banana liquor tastes disgusting, I bet it has a metallic flavor. I tasted it separately.  I was wrong. Banana liquor tastes fantastic by itself. I don't know why it isn't more popular. 

Same thing with cherry liquor. 

When I was first introduced to cocktails, Harvey Wallbangers were popular. At least the exotic tall slender bottle that Galliano comes in was popular. Everyone had a bottle of Galliano around. Sometimes a really big bottle, depending on how often they entertained and how large their parties. Now, nobody does. What a crap alcohol. Just look at its ingredients.  

Maybe one of these days I'll grow up to whiskey. But I doubt it.