OT But a useful thing

That sounds like a pudding Mr. Esther would love. Tell us the rest of it, NM. What kind of pudding has jam on top and then meringue? Polly

"NightMist" <

Queen of Puddings:

Yup, that is the pudding. Not that precise recipe, but that very pudding. Even our "I hate meringue" girl likes it. Which pleases me no end because as you can see it is easy, inexpensive, and does not contain dreadful amounts of sugar or fat.

NightMist

Traditional school pudding, that. In the Olden Days... ;)

I keep reading 'easy' recipes with exotic kinds of sugars. I'm just wondering where on earth a person goes to buy such things. I'd think about ordering online, but paying postage on sugar just seems awful.

Sunny

A lot of them aren't near so exotic as they sound. The problem I run into is sometimes off the shelf North american versions are not quite the thing.

Confectioner's sugar is not always a drop in replacement for european icing sugar. Confectioners sugar is cut with cornstarch. American brown sugar is not always a drop in replacement for brown sugar from many other places. Most american brown sugar is naught but white sugar with a drop of molasses added.

Sometimes it doesn't make a bit of difference. Sometimes it is just full of fail.

As I grok it caster sugar is just superfine sugar. Make your own by running regular white sugar in the food processor. No sense buying the spendy stuff when a couple minutes and pushing a button will do. The point of it is it dissolves faster, so if you pay attention to the recipe and how you do things you might not even need to bother. Depends on how easily you actually need the sugar to dissolve.

Demerara, muscavado, turbadino, and jaggery are all pretty much the same thing. Raw sugar, naturally brown, and in various fineness of grinds. Raw sugar is pretty pricey (talk about counterintuitive!), but it does taste very different from the brown sugar on the grocery shelf.

Here is a whole dictionary of sugar:

What bites my butt is having to read the ingredients on a bag of sugar. If it is a blend it should say so in big freaking letters on the label! I have been caught by blends that don't say they are though. Nothing quite like winding up with a pot of chocolate syrup instead of the plate of fudge you were expecting because it didn't occur to you that you had to read the ingredients list on a kitchen staple. I wound up having to threaten mayhem, and warn everybody that the next blend that came into the house would portend mailordering proper sugar in fifty pound sacks, before I was promised that no more blends would be bought when I wasn't there to personally read the label.

NightMist