The pseudo Black Forest Cake was a success a couple of weeks ago (yes, posting here is very sporadic) and I was talking about it with one of the grad students as part of a broader conversation about cooking. This inspired her to make Colombian empanadas, and I found one at my desk on Friday. […]
Author Archives: jimhu
Black Forest Cake part 2: Everything else
Once the Genoise was cooled, I made cake syrup and chocolate shavings (sort of). Cake syrup is just 50% sucrose plus flavorings. The recipe calls for 50% syrup an 50% Kirsch. We didn’t have Kirsch and Texas doesn’t sell anything over 17% alcohol on Sundays, so I used some Frambois we had around. The recipe […]
Black Forest Cake part 1: Chocolate Génoise
Debby’s father’s birthday is coming up and one of her sisters is visiting. We decided to be overly ambitious and make a chocolate cake. Not content with just making a cake (I’m usually more of a pie person), I decided that Joe Pastry’s Black Forest Cake looked good. It starts with his Chocolate Génoise 2 […]
Ethernet weirdness
Yes, the connected light is green and showing “connected” for my display ethernet even though the display is unplugged. And even when it’s plugged in my computer only connects to the net via the backup wifi while in my office. The jack on the wall and the cable are OK, because they work with an older […]
Serious Eats pie crust
Lately I’ve been using Kenji Alt-Lopez’ Easy Pie Crust recipe from Serious Eats. Posting here will help find the link and preserve the very minor modifications I’ve made. The original calls for using 2/3 of the 12.5 oz of flour in the first step. This is ridiculously precise, so I’m just doing the weighing of […]
iOS 8 iBooks annoyances
I generally like the UI of iBooks better than the Kindle app, and I like being able to buy books inside the app. But there are some things about iBooks in iOS that really annoy me… some of these are new or worse in the version in iOS 8, where iBooks comes preinstalled. Updates: a […]
JSmol2wp plugin released at wordpress.org
A while ago I wrote a WordPress shortcode plugin to embed Bob Hanson’s JSmol molecular structure viewer into WordPress posts and pages. Last weekend I finally got it into the wordpress.org plugin repository. The basic usage for proteins is via a shortcode like this: [[jsmol pdb=’1LMB’]] The plugin fetches the appropriate record from the PDB […]
WP PubMed Reflist
I committed a couple of updates to my WordPress plugin for getting reference lists from PubMed. The new version allows customization of the display. I preloaded some templates that approximate a few popular formats NIH format [pmid-refs key=’jimhu’ style=NIH limit=5] ASM format [pmid-refs key=’jimhu’ style=ASM limit=5] PNAS format [pmid-refs key=’jimhu’ style=PNAS limit=5] Notes The formatting […]
Sous vide brunch
Sunday brunch: Food processor hollandaise melt half a stick of butter. While melting, in the processor bowl 2 egg yolks dash of dijon salt pepper juice of a lemon pulse add the melted butter After processing, I suspect that the butter was not hot enough to cook the egg yolks, and the sauce was too […]
Thanksgiving dinner
We decided to be antisocial this year and are doing Thanksgiving at home. Since there are only three of us, a whole bird is too much, so I went for a Sous Vide turkey breast with some sides to be determined. Classic Cranberry-Orange Relish The first thing I’m going to make is the cranberry relish, so […]