Blog.EmealsForYou

As frequent readers will know we moved just before the New Year.  Setting up the new kitchen, getting things where I want them, getting a “good flow” of movement has been a building process.  Sometimes it’s the little things we miss.

This weekend I was responsible for the desserts at a neighborhood picnic.  I settled on Croissant Bread Pudding and Hazelnut Toffee Cheesecake, as both are great and serve a ton of people.  Baking the desserts seemed to take longer than it should have.  I should have looked into the reason why but rushed through and they came out great, although taking longer and requiring me to constantly check on them.

I should have remembered installing a new oven for my mother-in-law a few years ago.  Visiting months after the install she said her recipes were taking a longer time to bake.  I cooked some David Lee Shrimp ((From the Appetizer Collection at emealsforyou.com)  and they seemed to take forever to bake.  Pulling an oven temperature gauge from her closet I found her oven to be off by about 25 degrees.  The fix was an easy one, the manual instructed me to push these buttons in sequence then that button to raise the temp and it is fixed.

Back to my problem.  When the light bulb in my brain went off I simply checked the real oven temp, hence the picture of the gauge above, and found my oven was off by 10 percent.  That means that my desserts, requiring 350 degrees, were baking away at only 315 degrees.  The bottom line is for a few bucks you can check your oven and perhaps save time when baking or at least have piece of mind that what you set your temp to is actually the temperature in the oven.

Here’s the Hazelnut Toffee Cheesecake  recipe.