Garlic Press

I've been watching some more America's Test Kitchen lately and have seen them using a garlic press for mincing. It looked pretty effective. It's been a while since I've tried it, over 10 years, but I've been carrying mine (a gift at some point, I think) around for a long, long time. So, in making my ersatz ratatouille, I decided to give it a shot and literally dug mine out of the bottom of a storage box.

Okay, granted, I've got one of the ubiquitous aluminum ones everyone had a while back, but, boy, this sucked. With average-sized cloves, at least 1/2 of each one would be stuck in the "bowl" of the device. I'd have to dig them out and then re-seat everything, getting that sticky garlic juice all over my hands anyway.

Maybe the design of the one they use on ATC is better (it certainly looks fancier), but I have to give this one an "F." I'll stick with my new-found method of grinding it into a paste with kosher salt using the back of a knife.

Pan Handling (Chopping Block class)

I got the impression when I signed up for this class that is was going to be a survey of different pans and their use. And then as soon as I got done and thought back on it, I thought I had no idea what the focus was. Finally, looking back through the recipes, I realized that the topic was specifically use of the saute pan.

Oh, okay. I really think that could have been a LOT clearer. I'm totally one for a clear, strong thesis statement. Granted, I was a hair late and might have missed a minute (and I mean, literally, 60 seconds of instruction), but I think that if could have stood some better explanation.

That being said, it was some good recipes and a good experience. I ended up buying the ScanPan saute pan that we used, having decided that my crappy Calphalon omelette pan just wasn't good enough, so maybe I did get at least part of the message subliminally.

The instruction was okay, but generally on the lower end of my Chopping Block experiences. I learned more about pie crust and the recipes than I did about techniques for the pan or anything. I think, in part, a lot of content is covered in the other classes I've taken (browning and deglazing, for example). But the recipes themselves are really, really tasty and I had a neat group to work with, so it was definitely worth the time.

In this class, we made:

• Caramelized Onion Crostada
• Sauteed Mushroom Bruschetta
• Chicken Piccata
• Seared Sea Scallops with Celery Root Hash

The various learnings and tidbits includes:

• I'm amazed at how much I like celery root. It has a slightly sweet taste and very smooth texture. I think I was expecting something more turnip-like from the look and texture when chopping. I've seen it occasionally at the local Jewel - it's totally one of those things in produce that you overlook until you know to look for it. Also, this really opened up my eyes to roasting all kinds of vegetables.
• I'm liking the free-form tart thing a lot. I've seen a lot of recipes for various types recently and this was my first try. This was quite good and I think I'll be doing others. Though the dough for the tart wasn't technically part of the topic, the instructor made the point that we should hold and roll the body of the rolling pin, not the handles. Also, to use plenty of flour to prevent sticking and to rotate the disk 1/4 turn after every stroke.
• When sauteeing the onions for the tart, we started at medium high to get the caramelization, then dropped to medium and then low for the softening part. I don't know if I would have done this by instinct or would have pulled them off then they were browned, but still too firm, for fear of burning.
• The best places to buy fish in the city, by a long shot, are apparently the Fish Guy (4423 N. Elston) and Dirk's (2070 N. Clyborn).
• When searing scallops, you have to be careful not to overcook them. However, if they don't release from the pan easily with tongs, they're not done yet.

Busy Night - Updates

Tonight, I slammed out five items in an hour. That's what practice buys you. Those kind of sessions are still rare, but happening more often now. The items included:

• Raspberry Coulis - for the Panna Cotta. I made the custard the night before, but my raspberries were still frozen then.


• Turkey Keema Mater - Do-over - I made it right this time, with cumin seed instead of fennel. It's a lot, lot better.
  
• Spiced Rice - Yes, it was definitely a bad batch of rice before. This is the second batch I've made the basmati I bought in December and it came out perfect. I'm throwing out the rest of that first one.


• Broiled Chicken Breast - No challenge here, of course, but time was eaten by prepping and seasoning the breasts. I am liking how the breasts I bought at Costco require a little less trimming than Jewel's.


• Channing's Dinner - Okay, this barely counts. I threw cold pasta in a bowl with some of the homemade tomato sauce, nuked it for 1.5 minutes, tossed in a large-diced broiled chicken breast and sprinkled some parmesan. But while I was juggling the other stuff...

Fennel Seed Tastes Nothing Like Cumin Seed

God damn it.

I finished up the gnocchi at lunch today and wanted to make Keema Mutter again, using turkey for the lamb and, for the first time, adding plain yogurt to make a sauce to account for the relative dryness of the turkey.

For some insane reason, I apparently had put some fennel seed in an old cumin seed bottle and threw that in without checking. I didn't realize my mistake until I tasted it at the end. Jesus. I vaugely remember doing that with the bottle at Thanksgiving, but I'll be damned if I can remember why.

On the upside, the yogurt part worked really well. I also added about a cup total of chicken broth as well. This is also the first time that I made this recipe from Razzaq's Indian Lowfat Cooking without any other alterations - I've before taken spices from other recipes, but I wanted to see how this would work on its own.

Obviously, I still don't know. But the result is tolerable enough that I will eat it rather than throwing it out. But just barely.

I had just been thinking of those two times on Top Chef when guys had grabbed salt instead of sugar and vice versa, thinking to myself, "God, they were dumbasses."

Welcome to the club, Hal, welcome to the club.

Update: I just had some for lunch today and it's actually okay tasting - much better than I expected. Won't be doing this on purpose any time, but it's a step above "I'm going to have to choke this down so that I'm not wasting food."

Roasted Chicken

Oh, this didn't go well.

Channing is a fan of the rotisserie chicken from Jewel and I figured that the practice wouldn't go to waste. It would allow me to feed him; practice the technique (as simple as it seemed), which would be good prep for the holidays with turkey and get more materials for a homemade chicken stock (I've frozen all the carrots from the knife practice last week).

My instructions from class were buried in a clean-up of my office last week, so I started this from memory on Wednesday night.

I thawed the bird (part of the back was still frozen), softened a stick of butter, mixed in about 2 Tbsp of a holiday spice rub from Whole Foods which I had extra (dried rosemary, sage, thyme, etc), and rubbed it under the skin of the bird. I used the "natural" truss of cutting small whole in the skin and tucking the drumstick ends into those whole. I then put it in the roasting pan and popped it into the over at 400F.

It was started and in the oven when I found the instructions and saw the first possible problems.

In my rush, I committed a cardinal sin - I forgot to wash and pat-dry the chicken. Then, I forgot to salt and pepper the outside and cavity before applying the butter. The first is obviously way more important. It had been rinsed in the course of thawing, so I wasn't too worried, but it should always be done. Don't know what was wrong with me.

I did add another stick of butter, btw, for basting. The roaster I have is pretty big and the volume of juices and melted butter on the bottom of the pan just wasn't enough to draw up into the baster (i.e. being spread too thin in the pan). In class, we used smaller roasting pans which were perfectly sized for a chicken.

So, it baked for about 2.5 hours (20 minutes a pound for an almost 7 pound bird). I tested the temperature and it came out as 175F.

It was about 10:30p by the time it was done, so I let it cool and then put it in the fridge for dinner the next day. And then things went wrong.

I put it back in the over at 200F to warm up and started rice for dinner. I figured I'd make a sauce from the butter-laden drippings for both. I walked away for a bit and came back to find the rice at a boil - god knows how long it had been doing that - and then dropped it to a low flame. when all the water was gone/absorbed, the rice turned out underdone. Didn't find that out until the end.

Then I poured the butter/drippings into a saucepan, brought it up to heat and then whisked in a few tablespoons of flour to thicken it up. For a while it looked like things were going well, but I tasted it and it seemed gritty, like the flour hadn't cooked. 20 minutes later, it wasn't any better and I gave up.

And to cap it off, when I started cutting up the chicken to serve, I found that it was undercooked. I don't know how that happened, with the test, and none of it was actually raw, but there was definitely much too much pinkage.

So, the chicken and rice were both undercooked and the gravy was crap. The only upside (other than general learning) was that I can still use the chicken carcass for stock.

Practice Makes Perfect - Knife Skills

And so the pithy blog entry titles begin.

I've been meaning to have a practice session on my knife skills for some time. I've gotten my first Globals for my birthday and anniversary and had bought a big 'ol bag of carrots a week or so ago. Also, I had a good chat with my instructor at the Chopping Block on Saturday about various things culinary, including what culinary school is like (she also teaches at Kendall College). Hearing her describe the kinds of tests the kids have to take/pass, including knife skills, inspired me to just get to it already. Also, she reminded me that you can use all the bits in stock, so it's not like they go to waste.

So I carved up the whole mess in slices, juliennes and various sizes of dices whilst watching reruns of cartoons. Even within the hour or so I took, I saw some definite improvement in getting consistent slices, straight lines and clean cubes. A lot more time and variety is needed, but it was time well spent.

Poached Chicken Redux

This isn't so much a Do Over, as I thought this went well the first time, but I definitely learned something last night.

Due to some household stuff last night, I decided to put off the low(er)-fat Indian Spinach Experiment until tonight. In the interest of putting together something simple, I decided to poach some chicken to toss with some Trader Joe's Potato Parmesan Gnocchi.

I was dealing with the insanely thick (and inconsistent) Jewel chicken breasts and I wanted to avoid the underdone ones I had last time. I used the flat side of the meat mallet to get a uniform thickness of about 3/4 inches. Yet, all of them came out underdone. Fortunately, I checked them before I shredded them. I hadn't tossed the water yet and was able to reheat it to a boil to finish them. But they suffered for it a little. The breasts were not as tender and smooth as before.

Here's an excerpt from that recipe, specifically regarding the chicken:

1. Place the chicken, oil and the juice of one of the lemons in a bowl; cover. Set aside to marinate at least 1 hour.
2. Heat salted water to a boil in a large skillet; add the chicken breasts with the marinade. Lower heat to a simmer; poach chicken until cooked through, about 10 minutes. Drain the chicken; transfer to plate.

So, that part about lowering the heat to a simmer is apparently very important. I turned the flame to Low, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't a real simmer going.

I'm also thinking that the marinade is a factor. For time, I skipped that. Given the underdone-ness and the slightly off texture, I'm guessing two things are at work: 1) I understand that an acid marinade actually cooks the meat a bit. So by skipping the marinade, I may have accidently reduced the cooking time. 2) I lost the tenderizing aspect of the marinade as well.

Chemical Burns - Ouch.

I went down to Fort Worth this past weekend, so I accrued no kitchen time. I tried to make up for it last night by making the Bengali Red Lentil Dal, which would also use some of the tomatoes and onions from the knife skills practice last week.

The only thing I really had to chop were the serranos. I think I've come to see the light on one thing I disregarded in the Knife Skills class. There, we learned to chop small peppers by quartering them and then slicing out the seeds and membranes. My method has always been to tear those parts out with my fingers, to make sure the peppers are really clean. Well, when doing six of them, versus the usual one or two, that's a lot of spice. My fingers are still burning. Ow, ow, ow. Thank God I was careful not to touch my eyes.

I'll be slicing those puppies from now on.

Also, as tasty as that recipe is, this time around I noticed that there is a LOT of ghee/oil in it. 6 tablespoons. I have to figure out a way to reduce that. Since I have about 2 or 3 pounds of those lentils left, I guess I'll have many opportunities. Tonight I'm going to try to make the saag paneer less oily, for the same reason.

Reheating Sauces

Yesterday, my sister found this blog in the course of an email search. I hadn't been promoting this other than a recent addition to my email footer. Also, Johanna over at the very interesting and highly recommended Comics Worth Reading linked to me once after I asked her a question about the Amazon Associates program. So, I was curious to know who was looking at this, as I had previously assumed I had an audience of, maybe, 3. Not that it should affect what I'm doing, which is to motivate myself and document progress. Anyway, I installed a hit counter (Blogpatrol), which also includes some reporting on how people got to the site. One feature is that they tell you the search criteria used to get here if someone used Google.

Whew. What's my point, other than to freak you out about Big Brother?

Someone yesterday got here with the phrase "reheating bernaise sauce." So this reminded me of something I hadn't shared yet. 1 1/2 weeks ago, I had my at-home success with hollandaise sauce, for which I closed the report with "Eggs Benedict tomorrow!" That Sunday, I went ahead with that plan and put the sauce in the microwave. Guess what? Yeah, I'm sure everyone else in the world knows, but it almost immediately broke. The sad thing is that I tried for 30 seconds (on the default setting of High) first and it seemed okay. But rather than stirring what I had at that state, I popped it in for 30 seconds more. That's what did it.

In Sauce class a few days later, our hollandaise got cold before our end of class meal and I wanted to avoid the same result. So, I made a warm water bath and very gently whisked the sauce to keep the temperature even. Note that before I possibly ruined my teammate's work, I did run this by the instructor and get the thumb's up. The method worked very well. I need to look up how to save those after they do actually break or to thicken it up if it's too thin; there must be a way. If the yolks curdle, it's hopeless, but afterwards...

So there you go. You implicitly ask and you receive.

Using the Mandoline Slicer

The goal tonight was knife skills practice. I had purchased a mess of potatoes, onions and a few tomatoes to work with. There's a big bag of carrots in the fridge, too, so that will be in a day or two. But, I got distracted by our Oxo Mandoline slicer. Yes, seeing one in use on last week's Top Chef encouraged me.

Ever since we got ours as a wedding present (after coveting the Steele's for months), I have never been able to get very effective use out of ours. It just seemed difficult to use. To be fair, I'd never practiced using it - I just gave it a shot when I was actually preparing a meal. So, there was no room for error or playing around. It probably also wasn't helping that after every attempt, I cleaned it by putting the blade in the dishwasher, dulling it every time.

So, I tried sharpening the primary flat blade on my new whetstone tool by pulling it out and treating it like a knife. That seemed to help a whle lot.

Also, I'd had problems before on the back part of the veggie in question not getting a clean separation at the end. A quick firm stroke with a full follow through really helped that - I started getting clean cuts all the way through.

The texture of tomatoes seemed to require a small twist at the end of the stroke to work through the tougher outer skin. I got a series of perfect hamburger slices, which I then chopped by hand to use in the Red Lentil Dal later this week.

I then washed a 5 lb bag of potates and went to it. These came out very nicely. I went for a thin slice at first, ~1/8". After a few of those, I dialed it down as thin as it could go, which also worked well. Not quite paper thin. I'll use these in a Potates Gorganzola Gratin later, too. Channing usually isn't a fan of potatoes, but tried these at Taste of Heaven last week and liked them. Cheese conquers all, I guess.

I tried julianning and the wavy side of the blade. What I can't figure out is how on earth you get waffle fries out of this thing. I'll have to look that up.

So, I'm feeling a lot more confident with this tool. I've got a LOT of potatoes to eat now, though.

Do Over: Buerre Blanc

It's a week of catch-up in the kitchen and my first order of business was to win my battle with buerre blanc. I tried the exact recipe I had tried the previous night and it came out perfect. Basically, I took the Chopping Block recipe and added the tarragon and lemon from the Trib recipe. As I expected, the heat was the culprit before and by controlling that correctly, I got a smooth, coating consistency. It does take a long, long time to work in the cold butter into the sauce and it does consume your full attention during that time. Definitely not an absolute last minute kind of thing.

The one thing I'll tweak next time is the tarrogon and lemon. While the sauce came out perfect, the flavor wasn't as intense as the night before. I suspect it had something to do with properly reducing the lemon juice. It was still really good, though.

I served it with the left over poached chicken from the night before and some gemelli tossed with white wine and olive oil. The pasta was my first planned use of that "sauce" from the fingerling potatoes and it worked just as I expected.

It was a very light beige plate, though.

Clarified Butter/Ghee

You've probably noticed a lot of references to clarified butter or ghee here. I had been content to use jarred ghee from the Indian market until I noticed how much it actually cost. The first time I had a recipe that called for it, I had made it at home, not knowing I could buy it in the store. That recipe, from an Indian Vegetarian Cooking book, directed you to bake a pound of butter in a 9x12 pan at very low heat (200F?) for a hour or two. (I think this may have been when I realized that good percentage of Indian cooking instructions are designed just to make you miserable. For some examples, take a look at the kitchen and cookware designs found in the book 100% India. Yikes). Needless to say, as soon as I saw that it was on the shelf, I started buying it pre-made.

So, as the pain in the butt factor drove me from making my own to buying it, my recent increased use of clarified butter (particularly with the hollandaise) made me more aware of the price. Staring at the $3.49 price tag for a small jar while whisking the sauce really bugged me. Thereby driving me back to making it on my own.

Basically, when clarifying butter, you're heating it to separate out the milk solids. Once those are removed, the butter can be heated much higher without burning. The second effect is to boil out the water content. Depending on what book you're reading, it's this second phase that makes clarified butter technically ghee.

A friend told me about his method, which was to nuke the butter and then skim off the solids with a swipe of the paper towel. Having read a few other sources, I realized that the microwave method sounded good, but you weren't going to get rid of the water well that way.

So, I got out my tiny glass sauce pans, chopped up some butter and set it going at medium-low/low heat. After a while, the solids came to the top. Here's the problem: skimming off the solids is a messy pain. I tried using the paper towel method, but a) you soak up some of the good stuff in the process and b) you use a LOT of paper towels. That's too much waste for me. On my second and third rounds, I tried my various slotted instruments, but no dice. I still had to resort to the paper towels. I'll look at the Chhopping Block tonight for a proper skimmer.

After I tackled the solids, I let it sit more to get the water out. This is really kind of neat. It seems that as the water molecules circulate to the bottom of the pan, they heat up enough to boil. So, you get these sudden small bubbles. It's like the movie versions of lava. I caught myself just getting mesmerized waiting for the next micro-boil. Anyway, I just let that go until the bursts stopped, like waiting for your microwave popcorn to stop popping.

Update: Okay, it seems there are two places the solids go: floating to the top (the foamy scum) and drifting to the bottom. So, it seems like straining it may be the best route to go. Also, my skimmer seems to be just fine. I couldn't find any that seemed better designed at the Chopping Block.

Menu: Filet Mignon and Sauces

Our friends John and Anita were in town for the weekend, so I figured I'd whip up a fancy-pants meal for them, to a) practice my sauces and b) show off the fancy new kitchen, which Anita had never seen. John had only seen it before we moved in.

The sauces I went with were a balsalmic viniagrette, bernaise (a variation on the hollandaise) and mornay (a variation on the bechamel). It was going to be relatively low risk as I pretty much made all three before. We had tackled the mornay specifically in class the previous week, I had just finally succeeded with the hollandaise and the vinaigrette, well, that's really hard to screw up.

The menu:
Spinach Salad with Vinaigrette
Filet Mignon with Bernaise Sauce
Steamed Broccoli with Mornay Sauce
Corn Basil Pudding
Peach Raspberry Pie a la mode'

Overall, this went off much better than the last meal (the Pork menu). I'd rate it as a solid B.

Timing remains an issue for me. I've decided to start serving from the kitchen, rather than family style. In part, this is because plating and presentation is kind of neat. Also, it makes it a little easier to control. I also want to be able to eat with my guests, so managing courses is tricky. In this case, I served the salad with the meal all at the same time. The timing was a lot tighter than before as I didn't want the beef to get cold, the broccoli to get overdone or get cold (which it does almost immediately) and the sauces to do whatever horrible thing they might do if they set for too long.

I figured the mornay was all right sitting for a little while, so my timing was take the meat out of the fridge, bring the broccoli water to a boil, heat the grill, make the mornay, grill the steaks, put the broccoli over the steam, make the bernaise while the meat set, then plate and serve immediately. The sequence is sound I think, but it doesn't allow much room for error.

The only new recipe here is the bernaise, sort of. It's a hollandaise, but the variation involves a white wine, vinegar, shallot and tarragon reduction, which I'd never done. I'll post that separately. I need to go back through and add internal links between these posts as well, so watch for that soon.

The blow-by-blow:

Spinach Salad with Citrus Vinaigrette: Nope, you can't screw this up. This Saturday, I met Marie and Larry down at the Old Town Wine Crush, a wine-oriented street fair. In addition to the fantastic chicken tamale I had at the Adobo Grill tent, I found a tent for Old Town Oil where they had tastings of their products. I bought myself a bottle each of their Blood Orange Olive Oil and their Tangerine Balsalmic Vinegar. I mixed these babies 1-to-1 and spooned over the baby spinach leaves. Raves all around. This is great, great stuff.

Filet Mignon with Bernaise Sauce: This course actually addressed two weak spots for me; grilling beef and the sauce. I'm very nervous grilling beef since I do it so infrequently. So, this was a good opportunity. I went with the filet because, well, I'm not sure. It looks classier, so maybe that's it. But, holy God, it's expensive. This isn't helped by the fact that I went to Whole Foods. Which turned out to be a two-hour ordeal, by the way, thanks to forgetting my wallet at home, the register that my transaction was saved on crashing and the largest crowd they've had early on a Sunday that anyone could remember. Sheesh.

I was aiming for medium-rare and ended up closer to rare, which I guess is okay. It tasted alright. I toothpicked bacon around the sides (more use of leftovers), which generally turned out fine, but was a little inconsistent - blackened toward the edges, a little under in the center of the strip.

The timing got screwed on the bernaise sauce. Maybe it was having an audience or the general time crunch, but my first batch ended up scrambled. Fortunately, I had one egg left, so I went for a second round (though the broccoli ended up a bit over done as a result). The sauce turned out way, way too thin which I think was completely a function of pouring too much of the wine/tarragon reduction in, rather than doing it to taste. And, perhaps I took it off the fire too soon out of fear of scrambling again. So, that's one that needs some practice. On cheaper cuts of meat, of course. As mentioned above, I will post the bernaise recipe separately.

Steamed Broccoli with Mornay Sauce: Mornay was the variation on the bechamel that we made in class. Basically, you add a little nutmeg (three swipes of the grater, if you're using fresh) and swiss cheese to the basic sauce. It was a little thick, but very tasty. Channing couldn't taste the cheese in the sample I brought home from class, so this was an improvement. As I mentioned before, the broccoli was a touch over done as I accidently left the cover on while I made the second batch of sauce. By the way, as I was checking my spelling of "mornay" on Google, I found that according to Wikipedia, "A Mornay sauce is a Béchamel sauce with shredded or grated cheese added. Usually, it is half Gruyère and half Parmesan." Hmm. Okay. I like the swiss, though.

Corn Pudding with Basil: Well, this is a lesson learned. While this was tasty, it wasn't as world-rocking as the first batch. The clear difference was that the corn I used wasn't as fresh. For the first batch, I used corn I had just bought that morning at the Evanston Farmer's Market. This time, it was corn from that same batch, so it was a little old. I had sliced off the kernels and refrigerated them after I noticed the ears were getting a little dried out. So, it seems that fresh corn is the key for that recipe. Oh, and I know that those "hairs" as I referred to them last time are called "cornsilk." Dunno how I forgot that.

Peach Raspberry Pie: I made this to use up the second batch of crust dough I had in the freezer and the rest of the raspberries. I was very careful to follow the instructions for the raspberry variation on the peach pie, even adding a little more sugar. Also, I was careful to get fully ripe (or at least closer than last time) peaches. It tasted just like it should. Just enough tartness from the raspberries, but not too much. The top crust separated a little bit, making kind of a mess from the pie juice,. That may have been a function of a) using a shallower pie pan b) the dough having been frozen before or c) not having made adequate vents on the top. But while it was a little messy to work with, it served up and tasted great.

Do Over: Those Damned Muffins

Sometimes, you cook things because you don't want food to go to waste. I saw that I still had about a pint of fresh blueberries left that probably didn't have much time left. So, it was muffin time again. There was just under the 4 cups I needed, so I extended it with some some raspberries.

I used the Foster's Market recipe again and I was very careful on my mixing and baking time. Regardless, I got very similar results to the last time. They are still a little tough for my taste, so it wasn't a function of over-mixing (which I assume creates extra gluten or something). It may just be the recipe. I did use jumbo-sized eggs, so I'll switch back to large for that. I'm guessing a third recipe may be in order.

Pie Crust

I don't know why I've had such a problem with pie crusts over the years. In particular, I had problems with one for a Chocolate/White Chocolate/Raspberry tart. A long time back, I just gave up in general. Whenever I had to make something with a crust, I would just buy the Pilllsbury pre-made, pre-rolled frozen crusts (they come folded in quarters).

I tried the basic recipe in the Joy of Cooking and, lo and behold, they came out perfect. I don't know what magic words in their suggestions made a difference, but something did. I used the "happy medium" recipe of shortening and butter and I could tell from the first batch of dough that it was just right, so I immediately made a second one to freeze.

The instructions for rolling the dough in the book, plus some of the hands-on instruction for the paratha worked out pretty well. My two big changes on technique were: 1) I erred on the side of too much flour, as suggested, and dusted the top of the dough, rather than the rolling pin. 2) When rolling, I worked to keep the pressure horizontal, rather then vertical as usual.

Recipe to be posted soon

Do Over: Glazed Lemon Poppy-Seed Cake

I tried the Lemon Poppy-seed cake from a few weeks ago again, to see if I could get it less dry. So, I reduced the timer to 25 minutes and tested it with a toothpick. It came out clean, so I took out the pan. I realized very quickly that the center was undercooked. Oops. I'm guessing that the huge amount of butter in the batter makes the toothpick test deceptive. Still, the outer ring was moist just as I wanted. So, the previous dryness was definitely an issue with baking time. A little more than this time, a little less than the first try.

Still tasted great, though.