No, I'm not suggesting ways of poisoning your friends, I just felt I ought to include a disclaimer. People have died of eating too many apricot kernels, but too many is a lot more than I used in this recipe. The Straight Dope offers the following helpful advice:
Ingestion of about a cupful of any of the above seeds is pushing things a bit.
Right, with that bit out of the way, where was I? Oh yes, I love apricots! Having eaten the delicious fruit, there's more yumminess to be had by cracking open the stone to get at the kernel inside.
The stones aren't the kernels. You have to crack them to get at the nuts.
They taste like bitter almonds and I think they're delicious, though I'm a little wary because of the whole cyanide business. Actually, getting at them this way, I'm unlikely to eat enough to cause me problems, but still. Rather than eating them neat, I thought they might make a nice flavouring for biscuits, so I made some plain biscuits (4 oz each of butter and sugar, 8 oz of flour and one egg yolk. I haven't decided what to do with the white, yet). Having cracked four nuts open, I mashed them up in a pestle and mortar and added them to the mix.
The biscuits are delicious, but the bitter almond flavour is undetectable. It must be there because without it I think these would taste very plain, but you wouldn't know it was there. Next time maybe I'll risk a few more than four kernels in this recipe. I'll just have to eat more apricots!
No comments:
Post a Comment
I don't know why Facebook thinks this is the most interesting text on the page - it's not, I assure you!
If you'd like to leave a comment, but it asks you to "Comment as" a load of options that don't relate to you, choose "Name/URL". You can type in your name and leave the URL blank.
Do leave a comment (unless the main point of your comment is to advertise your business, in which case it will be deleted). It's always nice to know I'm not talking to myself ;-)