bLIMEy...

Although I was fully aware that milk curdles when an acid is introduced, I still thought that it was a good idea to mix 250 ml of milk with 100 ml of freshly squeezed lime juice and its zest. I told myself that I was going to make lime pie filling. No, not key lime pie filling, because I don't have key limes, but just lime pie filling... the delicious, gooey, jammy-pudding filling.

Since I've never made lime pie filling/lime curd before, I thought it'd be an absolutely greatly stupid idea to use artificial sweetener instead of sugar for the lime pie filling. My mum bought a huge pack of artificial sweetener because she thought that it was sucrose :( So now I'm stuck with a lot of artificial sweetener and I'm not sure I want to use it, since it is obviously less superior than sucrose. :(

So, I don't really want to explain how I messed up making lime pie filling, but I basically mixed fresh lime juice (2 limes) with zest, milk and an egg. Then, while the milk was curdling, I added in artificial sweetener. After baking at 350 degrees for 30 minutes, and seeing that everything was still liquidy (and smelled nice), I figured I should just freeze the thin liquid product and make crushed ice.

It then smelled weird and tasted terrible. Oh gosh. b-LIME-y. It was. Atrocious. The texture was gritty, thanks to the milk. There was a millisecond of sweetness and limey-ness. And then, for the next 4 minutes, there was a putrid artificial aftertaste.

Bleh.

So. I mixed liquid with brown sugar, added stuff, and ended up with lime muffin-gluteny-somethings. They're not cookies or cakes or muffins... the texture is slightly rubbery and gluteny. They're not crumbly but there is a neat whole-wheatish-lime flavour and they're really moist... It actually is like a steamed cake! So if anyone wants to try these weird muffin things...

Ingredients

250 g whole wheat flour

250 ml milk

100 g brown sugar

24 packets of artificial sweetener (ew.) OR 200 g caster sugar

Juice of two limes

Zest of two limes

1 egg

1 cup shredded zucchini

2 tsp baking powder

Method

1. Mix all ingredients.

2. Bake at 190 degrees C/380 degrees F for 15 minutes.

Blood Test Soup...

I got another blood test yesterday morning, and I went home feeling fine. Little did I know that it would set up a perfect excuse for me, 12 hours later... [That's another story...]

My mum always makes this soup for me after a blood test. It's basically sugar, water, jujube berries, peanuts, white wood ear, a longyan/lychee-type thing, and lotus seeds. It's actually quite delicious if you add milk to it. Anyway, on the way back, my mum and I were discussing the soup. She claims that we're supposed to use rock sugar to sweeten the soup, rather than plain old granulated or caster sugar, since it's "sweeter" to use rock sugar. Urban myth also claims that using rock sugar is better since it adds a ton more nutrients to the soup, since it "melts" slower. My mum also said that the caster sugar "disappears" when put in soup, so you have to use rock sugar since it "cooks for longer".

I am here to disprove these ideas. Scientifically speaking.

1. If you have a chunk of rock sugar, and you emulate that chunk with granulated sugar, you will not get the same "sweetness" of sugar. I mean, if you have a cube of rock sugar, and you have a sugar cube, even though the volume is the same, the moles of sucrose is evidently not the same. There is a ton of air between each granulated sugar crystal in the sugar cube, whereas in a chunk of rock sugar, there is less air in a sugar crystal, let alone between each sucrose molecule. In fact, if you were to weigh the cube of rock sugar, it should definitely be heavier than the granulated sugar cube. So, more sucrose means sweeter soup. Simple.

2. Rock sugar is sucrose. Granulated sugar is sucrose. "Organic Evaporated Cane Juice" is sucrose. Brown sugar is sucrose, with some molasses mixed in. Sure, there may be "trace" minerals and blah from the refinement and treatment processing from when the cane or beet juice was evaporated. It's all one glucose covalently bonded with one fructose. In water, a chunk of sucrose molecules dissolves into individual sucrose molecules. Even if there were trace nutrients, you'd have to eat kilos of that sucrose to perhaps obtain 1% of your daily intake of some nutrient...

3. Both caster sugar and rock sugar dissolve in water. They both stay dissolved in the water. Sucrose doesn't just "disappear". Both caster sugar and rock sugar don't "cook" at 90 or 100 degrees C. They just stay dissolved.

I like this soup though. I'm glad my mum bothers to dump everything in the slow cooker and leave it on overnight.