dance in the street

too many random pictures of things today so i just picked a few themes.

the first is a continuation of spring springin' in austin. jeff and i went to the old house today to take pictures of stuff we want to put on craigslist, and the bradford pear trees in the back yard are so beautiful in bloom right now.

so then we get home and realize we hadn't eaten anything.. so we made quiche lorraine with pie crust from scratch and no real recipe for the filling. it turned out soo well. the two of us ate half of it in 20 minutes.

then we had been talking about making malted milk balls. so we look up recipes online. there was no recipe for malted milk balls, but we did find one for sponge candy which proclaimed to be just like them, without the chocolate. it called for corn syrup, which we didn't have. so we found a recipe for it too.

the tricky part is that you have to bring the corn syrup to 'soft ball' stage, and we didn't have a candy thermometer, so we had to rely on how it acted when you put a drop of it in cold water. we just guessed. it was fine.

the real problem was when we tried to make the sponge candy. we wanted it to be malty like the middle of a malted milk ball.. so we decided to add 2 T of ovaltine malted milk powder at the end when we were mixing in the baking soda.

once again, no candy thermometer.. this time we're going for 'hard crack' stage. we keep dropping it in the water. it just sinks to the bottom when it's supposed to be forming some kind of brittle string. but after a bit, it starts rapidly turning from clear to golden to caramel colored.

we take it off the heat and jeff dumps in the baking soda and ovaltine as i stir. it immediately quadruples in size and is turning darker and darker shades of brown by the second.

MEANWHILE, jeff is just furiously taking pictures as i'm screaming/stirring.

i dump it into the greased baking pan and hope it stops growing/doesn't get on my hand.

to make a long story short, we did not end up with malted milk balls. we did end up with burnt peanut brittle without the peanuts.

next time, we're just going to buy a thing of whoppers.