Lemon tarts

The boundaries of my baking skills kingdom have been expanded. Lifting a receipe from a book (LG microwave receipes or something) I tried my hand/luck at lemon tarts. The receipe used was different from the one given in the link. However, in essence a lemon tart is made of 2 modules :)

One is the base and the other the filling. The base is flour-based and the lemon thingy is in the filling or topping. The topping needs to be pulpy or jam like. Lemon and sugar give the taste and the texture is dervied using flour, corn startch/egg. Although mine could have tasted better (Megha did not dislike it nor did she have an overwhelming urge to gobble loads of it and termed it as "interesting") it does make a tasty dessert.

I guess replacing the lemon juice with orange juice should give orange tarts..that's what I plan to try next.

Roti Maker

2-3 weeks back there was a window of time when we did not have a gas cylinder at home for cooking due to some shortage at the gas company. Wasn't such a big problem since we could cook stuff in the microwave oven but making rotis was a big problem. So we decided to buy a roti maker.

So the roti maker has two plates between which you keep the dough and press and once a bit hot you turn the roti and let it puff. Sounded pretty neat to us. However, practice wasn't so perfect. The damn thing did not have a user manual and it seems there is a special technique for kneading the dough. In the absence of a manual we argued and reached a conclusion that we should make the dough wetter than normal. However even that did not work. The problem is as follows:

Both the pressing plates have a non-stick teflon coating. Since it is an electric roti maker both the plates are hot. So when you put the dough in surface of the dough loses all moisture and becomes slippery and when you press the plates the dough just slips out rather than flattening out into a nice roti that the gadget promises to churn out.

Trouble is I can't FGI :((

The maker Jaipan has this stupid flash site.

And while we are at rotis I might as well declare with immense pride that I too have mastered the art of rolling nice round ones :)

ReleaseComObject and peace of mind

don't go hand in hand :) This is a good article about the whole thing. The problem we faced unfortunately falls under case 3 in the advice provided in the linked article.