Caneles - Take 1 - Part 1

I try not to be a spur-of-the-moment kitchen items impulse buyer because I would end up with a kitchen full of things like this:


Isn't it sleek and pretty? But I do not drink espresso unless I am in a place where the locals drink it like water.

Or this?The pan is enameled, grooved, and square. Squarely groovy. Must have!

I also have a fondness for professional-grade food service items, which really should not be available to mere mortals like me. For example:

Who doesn't fantasize about owning her own ice cream shop? But really. My own cone holder? I can't indulge every kitchen item whim I have or else we would be living in an Aga Stove surrounded by footed cake platters.

But I recently discovered that reading blog postings, rather than recipes in a cookbook, has left me even more susceptible to the power of suggestion. Perhaps it is the sense that I am being individually communicated with rather than taught something in the pedantic (but useful) fashion of cookbooks.

When I read this post on making caneles, a French regional specialty that I had only had twice before in my life - once at Boulangerie, and once at the Iron Chef event, I thought, "I HAVE to try that!"

And moments later, I was on Amazon.com debating the virtues of copper Mauviel molds:
(beautiful! delicate! idiosyncratically grooved! (I seem to have an extra weakness for grooves), but $20 each and I would need to buy LOTS of them) versus a silicone mold, which comes all of a piece with eight molds and is only $20 for the whole thing:

So what if I can make only one thing in it for the rest of my life? It's a pretty cool one thing, like with my waffle pan.

I ordered it. My first silicone bakeware (apart from my SilPat). Once the weekend came, I was all set to go.

More to come...