Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Dreamy Music

YouTube playlists for this article (1, 2),
playlist compilation article


Songs with the word "dream" conjure mind wanderings. It's difficult to be asleep AND think or mentally sing songs about dreams and dreaming. However, one song that could fit the bill might be one about daydreaming, such as "Daydream Believer" by the Monkees.

List 1 of 2 (compiled late August 2012)
List 2 of 2 (compiles and added early October 2012)

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Tubular Waffle Grid Wafers

These tubes are soft rollups that you can spread frosting or other sweet filling in. The softness comes from rolling up baked waffle-cone wafers and dropping them into cylinders that are narrow enough for steam to stay in. For my recipe, I used color-coded 1-inch diameter test tubes. The recipe is actually from the waffle-cone machine manufacturer for making waffle cones. I wanted to try making tubes, as I don't keep ice cream in the house. If you want crispy tubes, roll each baked waffle around a dowel or chop stick and hold them together for a few seconds. (For my next experiment for making crispy tubes will be trying a fortune cookie batter recipe, a test tube rack, or both.)
My pixstrip show the following images:
  1. Equipment and utensils
  2. Ingredients and mixing
    1. Eggs and salt, to be mixed together first
    2. Sugar, to be added to the eggs and salt mixture
    3. Rest of ingredients
  3. Process completion
    1. Batter baking process (1st and 2nd image in the 2nd row)
    2. A set of rolled baked wafers
    3. Finished tube wafers
    4. Some tubes and frosting (filling optional)
Equipment and utensils (spray oil being a bridge from equipment to baking process)
  • Waffle cone maker
  • Mixer (I used an electric hand mixer.)
  • Measuring cups
  • Measuring spoons
  • Rubber spatula(s)
  • Plastic spatula
  • Mixing bowl(s)
  • Cooling rack
  • Cylinders (I used test tubes—aka "test tube shooters"—that I bought at Urban Outfitters, which are also available online.)
Ingredients and mixing (from the Simply Vanilla Wafer Cones recipe of the Bella Recipe Guide)
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/3 C of water
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 C cake flour (can sub with 1 C flour -2 T flour +2 T cornstarch)
    Note: I'm 'fessing up to having putting only 2/3 the amount of flours because I, duh, misread my list of ingredients
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
Recommended: Spray oil application about every other wafer or so.
  1. Beat the eggs and salt.
  2. Add the sugar and beat it. :-)
  3. Add the water, oil, cake flour (or replacement flours), and vanilla.
Process completion (baking, etc.)
Prepare the iron as instructed with your appliance. Because I've used mine a few times, I've only wiped the cooking surfaces with a clean, warm, damp kitchen rag for cleaning preparation, sprayed the cooking surfaces, and plugged the cord. Heating time is a minute or so.
For each disk, pour about 1 T batter, close the lid, and heat for about 30 seconds.
Note: If you want to make cones or bigger tubes, which won't easily fit into test tubes, pour 2 T. With 1 T batter, the lid locks fine. More than 1 T at a time, the lid tends to not stay locked. In my past recipe for waffle-grid tortillas, I held down the lid, using an oven pad for each hand. (Warning: The lid gets hot.)
Move the cooked disk onto the cooling rack, roll it up, and drop it into a cylinder. Continue the batter dispensing and baking process until you use up the batter. (My pixstrip shows a set of six filled, poured out tubes, and tubular wafers.)

I wound up with 22 tubes and some 2-T batter disks. Those disks didn't last long enough to make it into the picture. :-) My calculations for calories, considering my reduced amount of flours, came to about 50 calories for each tube. Placing about a teaspoon of frosting nudges the calories by another 25. IOW, the plate of four as shown in the pixstrip amounts to about a 300-calorie snack, about the amount in a good-sized candy bar. Eater beware!