Recent news, and saltcakes

[ashnistrike]

I'm neck deep in terrifying Deep Roots edits, but wanted to share a couple of posts elsewhere:

I joined Fran Wilde and Aliette de Bodard for the latest episode of Cooking the Books. Also on their site: the long-awaited honeyed saltcake recipe! 

Petra Mayer interviewed me for the NPR Books blog. I may have squeed a little, because NPR.

Comments

[heron61]

The honeyed salt cakes were interesting and odd but good. Of course with my household of numerous food allergies (dairy for me, gluten for one partner, sunflower seeds for the other - at least none of our current set of cats have any), I made one set with standard flour and the other with my usual mixture of 2/3 America's Test Kitchen GF flour blend & 1/3 almond flour.

The gluten containing ones were good (if salty, and when I make them again, I'll omit the salt sprinkled on top), but attempts to make individual cookies failed utterly, and they melded into a somewhat shapeless mass that cut nicely into bar cookies.

The GF ones adhered to the pan moderately firmly, and became a single bar cookie that completely filled their pan.

They were quite easy to make, and I did have much fun bringing a pan of each to my partners with the cry of "Deep One cookies!"

The one downside was the necessity of having to drink a truly impressive amount of water afterwards.

[eagleoftheninth]

Woooo! Just found this!

I am DEFINITELY gonna make these. Hey, question; Aphra mentioned using a bit of rendered chicken fat. I don't think I could get that, but I can get beef or pork dripping; any ideas on whether those could be incorporated? And if so, how?

[eagleoftheninth]

I finally got around to making these!

I made the proper Deep One version and found that amount of salt very good indeed, though you'd want a drink on the side. I didn't use schmaltz in the end because my co-cook doesn't eat meat.

They turned out slightly burned, but we think that was due to a temperamental aging oven. They were very good regardless if you ate around the burnt bits. For the salt topping I found fleur-de-sel mixed with dried seaweed at a specialist spice retailer's.

The recipe amounts given didn't yield 21 cookies though. I got 12 on my baking sheet plus about one or two cookies' worth more of leftover batter.