Tomorrow is April 1st. I thought it would be fun to share these Fruit Fool ideas so you can celebrate your own pun-y, foolish Tuesday.

The Fool is a classic British dessert that’s genius in its simplicity. You puree fresh fruit, sweeten it and fold it into whipped cream. (At least that’s what my memory tells me). The end product is a lovely bowl of fruited cream that’s simple and easy to make. I think this would be great with frozen or canned fruit too, as long as the juices are thoroughly drained. You don’t want the cream to run, and fold the fruit ever so gently, so that there are delicate swirls of it among the heavenly clouds of cream.

This makes me think about how wonderful this would be back home with Manila mangoes!

Top your fool off with a pretty wafer or stick, barquilllos, broas or even layer with some slices of pound or yellow cake. Add a sprig of mint or two.Yum.

Here’s an elaborate version:

And for Fruit Fool recipes, click HERE.

I also think these are great ideas for an April Fool’s mid-week dessert. Wouldn’t it be funny to serve cakes/sweets that looked like some other type of food, so you can tell your guests, “Fooled ya!”?

Hamburger Cake With Fries

Hotdog & Fries Cake

Cake And Donut Sushi With Gummies

I could make a Curlified, Fruitified Fool myself (and really wanted to-–I even have the strawberries and cream ready to go), but I am currently in the dregs of migrating GWAC to Wordpress (hands and eyes and BRAIN too busy!). I hope to start posting there very soon. In the meantime, hope you enjoy making fools for yourselves!

I would eat this.

Many chefs and foodies consider Larousse Gastronomique the definitive compendium of the many mouthwatering aspects of French cuisine. It includes recipes, ingredients and cooking techniques. It must have many yummy things mentioned in it, like full cream milk and European butter. Oh, heaven.

I love reading cookbooks. I’ll sometimes pick one out to read in bed when I can’t sleep. (Hence, my level of insomnia is often directly related to the height of the stack of cookbooks beside my bed.) The language of food is just so…deliciously satisfying. And there’s nothing like images of a ruby-red strawberry being dipped in dark melted chocolate or a simple sugar glaze falling gracefully over the sides of a lemon pound cake to lull you to sweet slumber.

I’ve never read the Larousse myself, but I am happily imagining drifting off to sleep with it and delectable macaron dreams.

On a somewhat disturbing, but admittedly interesting, note about the Larousse. Hannibal of Silence Of The Lambs fame uses the book in his own, er, culinary explorations. This is actually how I came to know about the book myself—as a fan of the Thomas Harris novels. The book leads to his downfall in Red Dragon; I will not mention which specific entry in the book, lest you change your mind about it. Haha.

The Larousse is now on my birthday wish list.:)

EDIT: Mama reminded me today of the often-told anecdote about how one day when I was three years old, she suddenly noticed how quiet the house was; I was usually noisy. She found me in a corner with a magazine, pretending to grab pictures of food from the pagaes and making the motions of shoving them into my mouth and chewing them. All she heard was me going, “Nyam! Nyam! Nyaaaaahhhmmm!” and saw me hunched over the magazine, pretend-munching the afternoon away. I guess I started early!

When I discovered these new ways of folding everyday items, I knew I had to share them. They’re the neatest things.

A TEE IN TWO
How to fold a t-shirt in under two minutes (or is it two seconds?), from the ingenious Japanese. They invented Origami after all. After you watch this, you’ll say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

FINELY FITTED
This is something I learned from cousins on my dad’s side. (They’re the scary ones who cross-stitch in their sleep and give Martha Stewart a run for her money.) It’s a way to fold fitted sheets so that they come out to perfect rectangles, cutting down on bulk for neater storage in the linen closet.

NAPKINS? NEAT-O!
I have a secret desire to learn how to fold dinner napkins into elaborate shapes. I think it comes from memories of fashioning stuff from those ubiquitous hankies we used to have growing up. I remember how, out of sheer boredom during recess, we would use hankies to fold everything from bras to babies in hammocks!

Here’s how to fold a pocket from a table napkin to tuck your cutlery into. I’m sure this would work with chopsticks too. Add a small flower or slim leaf for effortless elegance at the dinner table.

There are many more ways to play around with napkin-folding HERE. Like these:

The Classic Three-Point Fold

The Lover’s Knot

Have fun folding, everyone!

* Did anyone get my Kenny Rogers reference, I wonder?

So, I was actually intrigued when I found out about these Absinthe Lollipops.

And then, I became slightly disgusted by these Maple-Bacon ones, though I think I’d try them at least once.

And, however fascinated I am by the strange tastes that people’s palettes demand, I am too grossed out by this Tequilalix Lollipop to even consider it.

First two lollipops from lollyphile.com, the rest are from edible.com. Edible, by the way, also sells Hornet’s Honey:

And Chocolate-Covered Giant Ants.

Dessert, anyone?

These ABC (Already Been Chewed) Cookie Cutters by Fred are morbidly cute. I think these would work great with your standard Gingerbread, Sugar or Snickerdoodle recipe!

Cut-outs can actually be a bit laborious, but I’ve found that chilling the dough makes for more defined and easier-to-handle cookies.

Here are some sugar cookie ones with royal icing that I made for a godson’s birthday last year. I had never worked with royal icing before and had a challenging time making sure all the cookies were equally thick. It got easier after the second batch. Plus, I couldn’t find any surfboard cookie cutters, so the lady at the baking supplies shop showed me a cool trick–you can actually bend some existing cutters into other shapes. She showed me how to modify an egg-shaped one by elongating it to look like a surfboard. Cowabunga!

Another cookie-cutter tip: try to find ones that don’t have seams (like the ones above.) These make the cookies’ edges look cleaner. The seamed ones are more readily available, though, so just check that they’re well-made and that the seams won’t leave any obvious marks in the dough.

Cookies are, for me, literally bites of joy. Here’s hoping you make your own joyous bites soon!

Anna Godbersen’s Young Adult (YA) offering, The Luxe, is a fun read that I admittedly couldn’t put down. I say admittedly because it’s a YA book and my choice of it was partly driven by the book cover. (Aren’t those colors scrumptious? That dress looks like she’s been swallowed by a big pink cupcake, but I actually like it!) My brother went on and on about how the cover may be appealing to me because of something called the Golden Mean, a math/design concept whose definition is too long and profound for me to describe in full here. (It’s really interesting though, despite the math, so if you want to read up on how the Golden Mean figures in everyday design and even music, click HERE.)

The Luxe is “Gossip Girl in 1899 Manhattan.” Even if it has an ending you can see coming from a mile away, I still loved reading it. Maybe because it has all the elements of the classic Pinoy teledrama that I grew up with: the covetous best friend, the love affair with a boy from the “other side of town,” the girl torn between love and duty to her family. All fluff, but I think fluff is good in small doses (like 448 pages!)

Here’s the book’s website, with fun quizzes and downloads.

But, back to the cover. That dress revived my interest in learning how to bubble-hem, sometimes called a “blouson hem”. I found this at Kingdom Of Style – a fairly simple tutorial for turning an A-line dress into one with an elasticized bubble hem. It seems easy enough and this can absolutely be done by hand (with some patience). I hope to experiment on an old dress and maybe post the results. (I don’t know how I’m going to find the time to do it, but maybe if I wrote about it, it’ll actually happen!)

Here’s an illustrated guide on how to do a bubble hem in four steps. Complete instructions HERE.




On a further Luxe note, I found out from Amazon that a sequel is soon to come! Hay naku, look at how pretty the cover for THAT is. (It’s inspiring me to make Strawberry Cheesecake!)

Flour prices in the US more than doubled in the past month. This means that all types of baked goods—from cupcakes to pizza—are going to cost you more per bite.

Heard this all on CNN yesterday and was quite dismayed by the news. This impacts home bakers like me who will find pricier flour on grocery shelves.

This is all because of rising wheat prices in the US, owing partly to the increased demand for ethanol. (Ethanol is a substance derived from corn that has a myriad of uses, but mostly as a fuel.) Farmers are now planting more corn than wheat. And with the dollar’s poor showing in recent months, foreigners are turning to the US for their wheat needs. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that 59% of wheat produced in the US is EXPORTED, dwindling the supply here and puffing up prices like a properly made soufflé!

Globally, poor weather conditions didn’t help the growth of wheat crops around the world either. There was a winter freeze in the US and droughts in Australia and France.

A 50-pound bag of flour is now $37, up from $16 just four weeks ago. CNN tells the story of how such a jump in prices is affecting Manhattan pizzeria owner Joe Vicari, who feels bad for charging his “working people” customers $5 for two slices. I understand how Joe feels. If baking was where I got my dough (oh, the puns just keep coming), I would feel bad as well for making customers pay more for a cupcake or two. Someone who’s in the business of making money from baking/cooking has to love it fiercely. If their life’s purpose becomes less affordable for patrons to enjoy, then it just becomes, well, less purposeful.

I’m due for my next bag of flour and plan to monitor the prices over the next few weeks. Hunker down, bakers, we’ll pull through somehow!

When flour prices turn ridiculous, I’m just going to vent all this frustration into sewing projects. I have a lot cloth to work with from years of collecting a yard or two here and there. Oh, and some pretty Japanese paper! And yarn too! Ok, getting ahead of myself. Pulling back now. Haha.

For the CNN article on the flour fiasco, click HERE.

By the way, the poster above was an ad for Gold Medal brand flour in 1941 (I just love retro food packaging, don’t you?), the year when the company started enriching their flour, upping the thiamine content and adding calcium and iron to it. This was because studies at that time showed that millions of Americans were suffering from inadequate diets. Flour is such an integral part of nutrition and, on a deeper level, our palate’s memories the world over. I hope this whole thing blows over soon.