Is there a way to actually impart the flavour of blueberries to the muffin’s dough itself, rather than the usual plain tasting muffin with a few burst blueberries inside?
Are there cooking techniques that would allow me to render down a bag of plums into an edible perfume, to glaze a cake with?
Also, how do I keep my flat baking sheet pans from warping and twisting themselves?
Thanks for the help in advance.
Two ways I can think of.
use blueberry juice as a replacement liquid instead of water/milk.
dehydrate whole blueberries and grind them, and use them as a portion of your flour measure.
both options at once?
I don’t know if either of those would suffice, and would probably (in the case of blueberries) make for interestingly-colored cake, but I bet it would taste nicely.
As for your plums, you want the SCENT of the plums, or the taste? For the taste, don’t you just juice them and then reduce the juice over heat until it’s all thick and intense? Reduce a bag’s worth of juiced plums to about a half-cup of liquid, and I bet that would be hella strong. Add a crapton of powdered sugar to create the glaze, and you’re set. Now, it might take you a day or more to reduce that much liquid out, and you might not even be able to reduce it that much, but that’s the idea, isn’t it?
For your pans, you need to buy better quality pans. There’s no way to keep the thin ones from twisting that I know of.
The King Arthur Flour catalog, and I’m sure other food/spice/baking catalogs, offer for sale small bottles of flavorings of every type. Similar to the ‘almond’, ‘lemon’, and ‘vanilla’ flavors found for sale in groceries, but the catalog flavors have a wide range of tastes to put in baked goods. I can believe it, the difference between a home made ‘strawberry pound cake’ and an expensive professional ‘strawberry pound cake’ is like day and night, the pros use additives and extracts to improve flavor.
Along the lines of the previous poster, Lorann Oils makes a very extensive line of ‘flavorings’ or ‘essences’ that, for the most part, are extremely accurate. Their blueberry essence is very tasty. Even when I use real fruit in a recipe, I sometimes add a few drops of essence just to enhance the flavor.
The warping of pans means they’re too thin. Only suggestion is to buy thicker heavier ones from a restaurant supply store, or even Costco. They’re more expensive, but not break-the-bank expensive.