Posts tagged with cooking

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May 13, 2009

Beet Cake Pictures!

SarahR made Beet Cupcakes!

Camera phone pictures clearly demonstrate that though beet cake batter is pepto-bismol purple/pink (!) and beet cake is not red.

Batter is purple/pink:

Purple beet cake batter

Baked cakes are brown:

Beet cake brown once baked

All iced up:

Beet cake all iced up

Recipe review, via Gchat:

5:59 PM me: were the muffins yummy?
6:16 PM Sarah: fine–i prefer carrot cake, though.

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April 6, 2009

Beet cake is not red

I was eating the leftovers of raw beet slaw along with carrot cake for lunch and thought, if beet cake exists, it must have an awesome color.

Unfortunately, when I turned to the internet, I learned that’s not the case.  According to this recipe from Cooking Light, beet cake can indeed be made just like carrot cake and the batter is bright red but the cake bakes up to a golden brown:

beet-cake-ck-665202-l

From Cooking Light

This is really disappointing.  Shredding that many beets would be way too messy to justify a golden brown cake.

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February 17, 2009

Evolution and why we cook

Earlier this week Wired wrote about Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham’s talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.  Dr. Wrangham spoke about the evolutionary advantages to cooking.

In a numbered list:

  1. Kills parasites.  (Preventing us from getting sick.)
  2. Heat softens food making it less energy intensive to digest. (Less energy spent digesting food is more energy for other things.)
  3. Heat breaks down starch and protein which increases the body’s ability to digest them. (For the same amount of food, we get more starch/carbs and proteins cooked than raw.)

Evolutionarily, when humans learned to control fire (up to 790,000 years ago) and cook their food, eating became more energy/nutrient efficient (2 = less energy in and 3 = more energy/nutrients out).  This may well have played a big part in supporting the energy needs of the human brain, allowing us to evolve such big smart crazy connected brains (the accurate scientific phrasing clearly).

Related:

Book sized story from Dr. Wrangham available in June. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human