Individual Sticky Toffee Pudding Cakes (776)

This was a really fun, weird recipe, and I'd like to do it again.  You make the cakes in the food processor, mostly.  There is a surprising amount of dates in them--some ground for flavor and some sliced and rehydrated for texture.  You steam/bake the cakes in the oven under a tightly wrapped tinfoil cover.  Then you take them out, let them cool.  Meanwhile, you prepare the caramel, then poke 25 holes in the top of each cake with a toothpick.  Pour the caramel sauce.  Let it soak in.  Flip and dump the cakes into a plate and pour MORE caramel over the top.  Obviously, it's not a healthy choice, but it was lovely and moist and (as the name suggests) very sticky.

Blueberry Scones (pg 520)

Lessons learned from the blueberry scones recipe:
1. When in doubt, use the food processor.
2. When dealing with pastry, the freezer can be the most important tool in your kitchen.
3. Try rolling and folding, rather than molding pastry doughs.  It creates fluffy layers that make nice visible swirls (see above).  But, more importantly, the layers puff and separate in baking.
4. Scones freeze well.

Baked Manicotti (pg 152)

Valuable lesson learned from this recipe: pasta is pasta.  Shape is fun, but not necessarily important.  Rather than killing myself stuffing manicotti shells without tearing them, the recipe just had me do roll-ups with lasagna noodles.  It worked fine. 

I did everything pretty much right for this one, but I didn't end up liking it very much.  It was so heavy that I ended up with an instant guilt trip whenever I ate it.  Having it sit in my fridge for a week, making me feel depressed whenever I ate it made me reconsider the plan a bit.  Either I need to make dramatically reduced portions of the heavier foods or I need to skip them altogether.  It turned out okay, I guess, but the cheese+starch, barely adulterated with tomato sauce (which was good, by the way) made me think that this is not a dish for people who aren't spending the day tending goats and eating grapes, or whatever it is they do in Tuscany.

Why this isn't working

Realization:  I wouldn't read this.  It's just ruminations about recipes I can't share because they're copyrighted.  So instead of giving details and making it vaguely instructive, I'm just going to put up a picture of the finished product and my notes.  That will make it a lot easier, and make it more likely that I'll continue doing it.