Dates or apricots?

I needed something for my morning teas this week, so I decided to whip up an apricot loaf (p27). It's a variation on the date loaf recipe, i.e exactly the same, only with apricots instead of dates.

To soften the apricots, you chop them up and put them in a bowl with boiling water, baking soda and butter, stir it all together and then leave it for an hour.


When the soaking time is up, you add sugar, egg, walnuts and vanilla essence to the mixture, and beat it through. Finally, sift in the flour and baking powder, and mix it carefully until just combined. I find this incredibly difficult, and always end up overmixing my ingredients because I can't seem to get it all combined.

The combined mixture goes into the oven for 45 minutes. I'd written "40" next to this after trying the date version,  so I started checking the apricot loaf after about 35 minutes. I needn't have been so careful: this one took the full 45. I did have to place a piece of baking paper over the top part-way through the cooking time, otherwise the top would have burnt.


The resulting loaf was quite an interesting combination of crunchy crust and soft, fruity loaf. I suspect the crust isn't actually part of the intended result, but actually I liked the texture it added. Soaking the apricots had made them soft and juicy, so there was no chance of the loaf being too dry.

Overall, I liked it. Is it better than the date version? Actually, I think it might be!

More salty than spicy

Lamb satay (p151) is a recipe I've been meaning to make for some time. If the Edmonds book has one failing, it's a tendency for the recipes to err slightly on the bland side. Of course, generally you can adjust the recipes to suit your own tastes, but I'm obliged to stay pretty close to the recipe. I'm not hugely into spicy food, but it was still a welcome change to see a recipe with a bit of chilli in it.

Though the recipe uses four lamb steaks, I used just one - after all, I'm only feeding myself, and lamb's expensive. Though I was using one-quarter of the meat, I only halved the marinade and sauce ingredients, as the required quantities for a quarter recipe would have been too small to work with easily.

The marinade is made up of chopped coriander, oil, and sambal oelek (chilli paste). You chop the lamb steak into cubes, stir through the marinade, and leave it for half an hour.

At the end of the marinating time, you thread the cubes of lamb onto soaked bamboo skewers, and put them under the grill (or on a grill plate, I guess) and make up the sauce during the 8 minutes' cooking time.

The sauce is a simple combination of soy sauce, chopped spring onions, more sambal oelek and lemon juice. I'd also cooked some rice, so when the lamb skewers came out of the oven, I placed a couple on a bed of rice and poured over some sauce.

I have to admit I was slightly disappointed. Lamb's my favourite meat, so when I fork out for some, I want to taste the lamb itself. Instead, the meat mostly tasted of coriander, and the soy-based sauce was strongly salty with a sharp background flavour of lemon. Not at all what I expected.

For all that, eight minutes under the grill gave me nicely cooked lamb with a little pinkness in the centre, and if taken separately from the salty sauce, the coriander/lamb flavour was quite pleasant: I had the leftover lamb cold for lunch today and enjoyed it. Possibly with a little experimentation, this dish could become very tasty - but as it stands, I'm not a fan.

Aptly-named sponge

Since I'm yet again falling behind with the cake mix-based recipes, I decided tonight might be a good time to make easy fruit sponge (p216). Since a full recipe would be far too much to eat by myself, I decided to split the contents of my Edmonds butter cake mix in half, using the first half to make the sponge, and setting aside the rest of the packet to use in another recipe later on.

Since I needed some stewed fruit for the sponge, I started by chopping up a couple of apples and putting them on to cook. When they had started to soften, I made a start on the sponge.

The recipe begins with putting the cake mix, eggs, water and butter in a mixer. I couldn't be bothered dragging out my big mixer, so I used my electric beater instead, which worked just as well. You have to use the lowest speed for a start - so you don't get the dry ingredients spraying all over the room - then, once the ingredients are thoroughly combined, you turn it up to a medium speed and beat for a couple of minutes.

After two minutes' beating, the mixture was pale and fluffy. I spooned my apples into an oven dish and spread the sponge mixture on top. The recipe indicates a cooking time of 35-40 minutes, but since mine was a half-recipe, and particularly because I'd decided to use my benchtop oven, I expected it would take considerably less than that.

My benchtop oven is a useful little device, and I manage to bake in it quite successfully - I just have to keep an eye on what I'm cooking, as the food's a lot closer to the element than in a standard oven, and can burn quite quickly. For instance, my sponge went very brown on top before it was cooked in the middle. I had to (very carefully) place a piece of baking paper on top of the sponge to prevent it browning further as it cooked.


After about 25 minutes, my sponge was ready. Apart from that slight over-browning on the top,  it was perfect: lovely and light, with a slight gooeyness where it had sucked up the apple juices. There didn't seem to be much apple in proportion to the sponge, but that was almost certainly my error, as I didn't actually measure the apple to make sure I had enough.

So yes, easy fruit sponge makes a pretty good pudding. And, as the name would indicate, it's very easy to make. On the other hand, I have non-cake mix recipe somewhere that has a very similar result, so I don't see myself buying a cake mix specially to make a fruit sponge. But if you prefer the reliability of cake mixes, this might be one for you to try.

Breadmaker for a day

For some reason, there's a recipe in the Edmonds book for breadmaker loaves (p22). Since I don't have a breadmaker, this posed a slight problem. Fortunately, my boss happened to mention having a breadmaker, so I asked him if he could bring it in to work sometime.

It seemed to me like I was offering a pretty good deal: just bring the breadmaker, and I'll make some nice fresh bread for us all during a random workday. This was not, however, sufficient inducement for Roger, who insisted that if we were going to have fresh bread, we had to have soup to go with it. Skimming through my remaining soup recipes, I selected mushroom soup (p87) as a suitable accompaniment.

Oddly enough, there are no soup-making facilities in our office, so I was forced to prepare the soup ahead of time. It didn't take long though - you just sauté onion and lots of sliced mushrooms in butter until soft, then stir through some flour, before gradually adding the liquids (milk, and more of that home-made chicken stock).

When you've got all the ingredients in the pan, you bring it to the boil and cook it for about five minutes until it thickens. The final step is to season with salt, pepper and lemon juice, but I decided to leave this bit until we were ready to eat it. Instead, I put it in the fridge overnight and turned to packing up the ingredients I'd need to take for the bread.

This morning I arrived at work bearing a crockpot full of cold soup, and a bag full of miscellaneous ingredients. A breadmaker had magically appeared on my desk, complete with instruction booklet and all necessary accessories. It's amazing what you can achieve by promising people food! At around 10am, I carefully measured all the ingredients into the breadmaker, and pressed the start button. Easy.

As the breadmaker thrummed away on the floor of the office, the soup was slowly reheating in my crockpot on the bench. As I headed away for a dental appointment, lunch was happily cooking itself in my absence.

When I returned, the office smelled like fresh bread and the loaf had about half an hour to go. It had risen so high the dough was pushing against the lid of the breadmaker, and I wondered if it would cook through ok. A quick peek under the lid reassured us that it would be ok. 

The bread smelled so good that we wasted no time in taking it out and cutting into it. The loaf didn't last long either: everyone was keen to try some. There were fewer takers on the soup, but those who tried it found it very tasty - and extra good with fresh, hot bread.

The bread was an undoubted success, but I actually consider the inclusion of a breadmaker recipe a bit pointless. After all, if you have a breadmaker, you've also got a booklet full of recipes designed for that particular breadmaker. Why would you go looking for a generic recipe in the Edmonds book? That said, a breadmaker is a pretty cool device: every office should have one!

The mushroom soup gets a thumbs-up from me. You get a yummy, filling soup from a few basic ingredients and minimal time and effort. That's the sort of recipe I like!

Stocking up

I've made a number of the soups in the Edmonds book, for which I generally used bought liquid stock, conveniently overlooking the fact that there are also several stock recipes to complete. This weekend, I decided to make chicken stock (p85) before I run out of recipes to use it in.

The recipe calls for one chicken carcass. I'd bought a pack of two chicken frames, not sure whether or not this was the same thing. Either way, the frames were suitable for stock-making, and since one was quite small, I put both of them in the pot instead of just one. Stocks I've made in the past have come out a bit flavourless, and I figured using extra chicken bones might improve the taste.

To the chicken frames I added a peeled onion, a carrot, a stick of celery, half a dozen white peppercorns and 1.5 litres of water. There was supposed to be a bouquet garni of parsley, thyme and bay leaf - I managed the parsley and bay leaf ok, but had to make do with a sprinkling of dried thyme instead of a fresh sprig.

With all the ingredients in the pot, I merely had to bring it to the boil, and set it on a gentle simmer for a couple of hours. A bit of scum came to the surface early on in the boiling, so I scooped that off, but apart from that, I just left it bubbling away on the stove.

After about an hour, the smell of chicken was wafting deliciously through the house, and I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn't, in fact, looking forward to a nice chicken meal for dinner.

At the two-hour mark, I turned off the heat, strained the stock through a muslin-lined sieve, then allowed it to cool down a bit before setting it in the fridge overnight.

This evening I found a use for some of my chicken stock - and it wasn't even a soup recipe. Nope: I made pilaf (p106) as part of my dinner. It's essentially a rice dish, flavoured with onion and chicken stock.

Heating a flameproof casserole dish on the stovetop, I melted some butter and fried some chopped onion. Then I stirred in the rice and added some of my home-made chicken stock. After a little seasoning, I put the lid on and placed the dish in the oven.

In the twenty minutes it took to cook the pilaf, I busied myself with throwing together the rest of the meal. Before I knew it, the timer had gone off and the pilaf was almost finished - just a little more butter stirred through, and a sprinkling of chives, and it was ready.


I found the pilaf quite tasty. There was plenty of flavour from my freshly-made stock, and, while I try to avoid using much butter in cooking, it lends a nice buttery flavour to the rice. It would be interesting to see how much it would impact the flavour if you took away the butter. Maybe one of these days I'll try it and see!

Old honey isn't a writeoff

I happened to find some honey sitting in the back of my cupboard; a sad centimetre or two crystallising in the bottom of a jar. What use is grainy, sugary honey? It might not be too good spread on toast, but it's perfect for making honey snaps (p41).


The reason the graininess of the honey doesn't matter is that it gets melted, together with some butter and sugar. In a few short minutes you have a smooth, sweet-smelling golden mixture, with no sign of that sugary texture.

To this mixture you simply sift in some flour, baking powder and ginger, and mix to a lovely soft dough. The dough spreads out a lot in cooking, so it only takes one teaspoon of mixture to make each biscuit - with plenty of room left between to allow for spreading. I suppose my teaspoonfuls must have been slightly more heaped than the recipe intends, since it's supposed to make 20 biscuits, and I barely got 12.


After only ten minutes in the oven, the biscuits had spread out and gone golden around the edges. In fact, some of them were a bit too dark - I'll have to watch out for that next time.

From those few sad spoonfuls of grainy honey, I created a lovely batch of honey snaps: sweet and crisp (except when they're still a little warm, and have a delectable chewiness to the centre) and very tasty. It's an incredibly easy recipe that takes less than half an hour from start to finish. Got some old honey in the cupboard? Go on, give it a go!

Blast from the past

I used to bake a lot as a kid. Since then, my parents' carefully-instilled lessons to do with checking you have all ingredients before starting, and always cleaning up immediately afterwards, seem to have fallen by the wayside. On the other hand, my fondness for baking endures, and it was with some nostaglia that I whipped up albert squares (p60) this afternoon, since that was once one of my regular recipes.

It's very simple to make: you just cream butter and sugar, add eggs, then beat in vanilla and golden syrup. When that's all mixed in, you fold in a heap of currants, before adding the dry ingredients alternately with milk.


This mixture then goes into a sponge roll tin and into the oven for half an hour. Of course, it's not finished until it's been iced, so let it cool on a rack for an hour or so, then ice with a plain vanilla icing and top with lemon rind and coconut.

Ok, so if you don't like currants, you're not going to be keen on this one. If you do, you'll enjoy this spongy, fruity square - just the thing to go with your mid-morning cuppa.

It's not really about the apple sauce

It's about the crackling, of course! The thing is, roast pork is not an actual recipe in the Edmonds book - in fact, it's barely mentioned, even amongst the general meat-cooking information. On the other hand, I did have to make apple sauce (p185), which gave me all the excuse I needed when I saw some small pork roasts on special the other day.


So really, I didn't have to do anything Edmonds until my pork and veges had been roasting for about an hour and a half. At this point, I peeled and chopped some apples (they were supposed to be cooking apples, but I just used the ones I had) and set them to simmer with a little water, butter and lemon juice.

I'd also decided I needed some non-roasted veges, so I thought I'd have a go at sweet and sour red cabbage (p166). I chopped up some red cabbage, grated another apple, and put them in a pan. After cooking this for a few minutes, I added vinegar, brown sugar and seasoning,  then let it simmer for about 20 minutes.


Meanwhile, my apples had gone soft and pulpy. I mashed them up a bit and then beat the sauce with a spoon to make it smooth. I'd taken my roast out and started serving it up while I put the crackling briefly under the grill to make it extra crispy.

I can tell you this much: it's a very bad idea to make a pork roast just for yourself. Why? Because you don't have to share the crackling with anyone (and yes, there is such a thing as too much crackling)! But I'm supposed to be talking about the apple sauce, which was sweet, fruity and entirely worth the minimal effort involved in making it.

The sweet and sour red cabbage was a bit of an oddity. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't think it was particularly wonderful either. A full 25 minutes' cooking time makes for fairly soft, sloppy cabbage, and I prefer it with a bit of crunch. The sweet and sour flavour wasn't particularly successful either. It was edible, and not disgusting, but that's about the highest praise I can give it.

In short: thumbs-up to the apple sauce; don't bother with the cabbage, and if you're making a pork roast, be sure to share it with someone!

Birthday brunch

My sister-in-law Beth is something of an expert when it comes to eggs benedict (p95), so it was only good sense to enlist her help in making some for brunch on my brother's birthday.

Deviating slightly from the Edmonds recipe (or most eggs benedict recipes, really), we went with Beth's method of replacing the English muffins with sweetcorn fritters (p166). I've always had trouble with this seemingly simple recipe, as they tend to fall apart in the frying pan. To combat this, I accepted Beth's suggestion that we make them on a sandwich press instead.

We also put in a couple of extra ingredients as a result of Beth's extensive fritter-making experience, adding chopped parsley and shallot to the basic recipe of flour, eggs and creamed corn. With this mixture ready, Beth set about spooning it onto the sandwich press, while I made a start on the hollandaise sauce (p186).


Hollandaise sauce is a favourite with many, but with its high fat content, it's not exactly good for you. I was surprised to hear that Beth makes a successful hollandaise using milk instead of cream. Since we didn't have any cream on hand anyway, we decided to make the substitution and see how it worked with the Edmonds recipe.

You start the hollandaise sauce by melting butter in a double boiler, then add the egg yolks, cream (or in my case, milk) and lemon juice. Then comes the fun bit: you've got to stand there and stir it until it thickens and becomes a nice smooth sauce. No doubt it would have thickened a bit earlier had I used cream, and even when we finally pronounced it ready, it was still a bit thin. Beth tells me her recipe has three egg yolks compared to the two I used, and also less milk. So if you want to make a lower-fat hollandaise, make those adjustments and you'll probably get a better result than mine.

While I'd been pottering with the sauce,  my admirable sous-chef had finished cooking the fritters, grilled some bacon (another substitution - it's ham in the recipe) and completed the final element, poached eggs (p96).

I'm not great at poaching eggs, so it's a good thing Beth was there to deal with those. This also allowed me to observe her method of lowering each egg into the saucepan in a teacup, and allowing the simmering water to surround the egg for a few seconds before tipping it out of the cup. I'll have to give that a go myself next time.

From this point it was merely a matter of assembling the eggs benedict: placing a piece of bacon on each fritter and topping it with a poached egg and a generous helping of hollandaise.


For my first attempt at eggs benedict (albeit heavily reliant on an experienced assistant), I was very pleased with the result. I have to recommend the substitution of sweetcorn fritters - it makes a more hearty meal than a muffin, and if you do them on a sandwich press instead of frying them, they're much less greasy. 

The sauce, as I've mentioned, was a bit thin, but the flavour was there. By all means use cream if that's how you like it, but for myself, I think it's worthwhile to experiment with the milk version. 

However you make it, eggs benedict makes a delicious brunch - as many cafe-goers know. If it's one of your cafe favourites, why not have a go at making it yourself?

Cake like Canada

Since I was going down to Timaru on Saturday to celebrate my brother's birthday, I decided it might be a good idea to make him a birthday cake. What kind of cake? Well, everyone loves carrot cake (p45), right?

I hadn't had carrot cake since I was in Canada last year, where there seemed to be another delicious carrot cake every time we turned around. I'm not sure if this is a particularly Canadian thing or just a coincidence, but I'll probably always associate carrot cake with Canada now.


I approached this recipe with caution, as some of my carrot cakes in the past have come out a bit heavy.  You do of course want it to be moist, but there's a fine line between moist and gluggy. The Edmonds recipe, like many carrot cakes, has crushed pineapple in it, which adds a lot of liquid and can make the mixture too wet. To prevent this, I had the pineapple sitting in a sieve to drain thoroughly while I prepared the rest of the ingredients.

I began by beating up the eggs, stirring in some oil, and sifting in the dry ingredients. This produced quite a stiff dough and I wondered if I would have trouble mixing in the carrots, walnuts and pineapple - especially as they were supposed to be folded in.


It took a bit of effort - and folding went entirely out the window - but I got it all combined in the end. I did actually end up with a mixture that was moist, but not too wet and runny: just what I was aiming for.

One further advantage of this recipe, in terms of it not coming out with a soggy centre, is that it's made in a ring tin: so there's no centre to get soggy. Of course, my version of a ring tin is a normal tin with a drinking glass  in the centre, but it has the same result!


I baked the cake for 40 minutes as per the recipe, but ended up putting it in for a little longer when it didn't pass the skewer test. finally it was out and cooling, while I ran around getting ready to head to Timaru.

But I wasn't about to forget the final component: cream cheese icing (p77). It didn't take long to beat together the butter, cream cheese, icing sugar and lemon zest, but the cake still wasn't cool enough to ice. Not about to wait around just for a cake to cool down, I packed up the cake and icing and took it to Timaru with me.


My carrot cake was plenty cool enough by the time I got to Timmers, so I wasted no time in finishing it off with the icing and a sprinkling of chopped walnuts. It looked pretty good, but we had to put it away overnight, since Anthony's birthday wasn't actually till Sunday.

I'd crossed my fingers that there was enough moisture in the cake to prevent it drying out overnight. Apparently there was, because it was still fine when we cut into it on Sunday. I'd succeeded in making a carrot cake that was moist but not gluggy, so I was quite pleased with myself. It might not rate as absolutely the best carrot cake I've ever eaten (looking back on those Canadian ones) but it was better than many I've tried: sweet and moist with a lovely creamy icing. I'll have to remember this recipe next time I get a hankering for carrot cake!

Jelly + custard = disaster

I found myself wanting something sweet last night after dinner, so I leafed through the cold desserts and selected melrose cream (p203), entirely on the basis that I happened to have all the necessary ingredients in the cupboard.


It seemed quite simple: you make a custard, then make up the contents of a packet of jelly, combine the two, and chill until set.


I was a bit short on time, so instead of mixing up the jelly after making the custard, I did the jelly first, which would give it time to cool down while I was making the custard. Add boiling water to jelly crystals, stir until dissolved, and place in fridge: Done.

The prospect of making custard was not particularly daunting - I've made quite a few successful custard-type desserts by now, which probably made me a bit over-confident. I stood at the stove, stirring my milk, sugar and custard powder mixture for some time, but it didn't seem to thicken.


After a while, there was a bit of resistance as I moved the spoon along the bottom of the pan. I knew some of the custard was sticking to the bottom, but the rest of it still wasn't thickening.


The minutes ticked by, and I started to catch a whiff of scorchy odour as I stirred the pot: I had to get that pot off the heat. The custard had thickened a little, but hadn't yet reached the consistency I was wanting. Still, if I left it on any longer, the custard would be entirely unusable.

By this time I was fed up with my melrose cream and already convinced it was a failure. I wanted to get that custard out of the scorched pan as soon as possible, so I stirred in the jelly mixture straight away. Neither mixture had cooled down much at this point - and I gather they're both supposed to have cooled by the time you combine them - but I mixed them together anyway.


The result was a weird sort of curdled-looking, bright pink mixture, which didn't look appealing at all. It hadn't set by the time I was ready for bed, so I left it in the fridge and didn't look at it until tonight.

My melrose cream did not look any better once it had set. The mixture had partially separated, leaving a layer of jelly on top and a dodgy mush underneath. But when I dug a spoon in, I was surprised to see that it that mushy stuff actually looked quite edible. So I tasted some: very sweet, but otherwise not too bad.


Stunned, I scooped some into a bowl, adding a little banana because an entire bowl of pink mush just didn't seem right, and sat down to eat. Unfortunately, after the first few spoonfuls, I was starting to revise my assessment of the dessert being edible. The texture, which I suspect ought to be light and fluffy, was more that of a curdled substance than anything. And the sickly sweet raspberry flavour was more than I could handle.

My attempt at melrose cream was a bit of a disaster, but I was able to glimpse the kind of dessert it's supposed to be - and I think if it's done right, it could be quite nice. Choose a less sickly flavour of jelly, don't burn your custard, and wait till both mixtures have cooled down before you try to combine them: do this, and you might just have a decent dessert on your hands. If nothing else, you'd be hard-pressed to produce a worse version than mine!

Better than Bryn's?

Time to try my hand at the Edmonds meatloaf (p126), an interesting undertaking as there's no way I'll be able to resist comparing it to the one I usually make, i.e Bryn's famous meatloaf with barbecue sauce. Of course, in essence, the two meatloaves are pretty similar - it's just that on this one, there's an oat-based topping instead of that delicious gooey barbecue coating.


I discovered long ago that the easiest way to prepare the ingredients for a meatloaf is to use a food processor. Mine usually ends up being a bit over-full, but it's much faster, easier and combines the ingredients effectively and tidily.

I started by grating a carrot, since that was the only thing I needed the grater attachment for. Pushing the grated carrot to one side, I switched to the chopper blade, then added garlic, onion and parsley to the food processor bowl.


Somehow I managed to cut two fingers while chopping the onion into chunks suitable for the food processor. Shortly afterwards I dropped a large knife precariously close to my foot, and started to wonder whether I was risking my health by staying in the kitchen in such a clumsy mood. The meatloaf was half done, however, so I persevered.

The onion, garlic, carrot and parsley were chopped and combined in a matter of seconds, so I put in the remaining ingredients: mince, sausage meat, mixed herbs, mustard, salt and pepper, and an egg. Combining this thick gooey mixture took a bit longer, but it was still done within a couple of minutes.

I spooned the meat mixture into a loaf tin, and mixed together a topping comprised of rolled oats, brown sugar, tomato sauce, and more parsley. I spread this mixture thinly over the top of the meatloaf, and plonked it in the oven.


A few minutes later, I rushed back to the oven, on recollecting that I was supposed to cover the meatloaf with foil for the first half-hour's cooking. No harm done, though - it hadn't been in long and adding the foil took only a few moments.

After half an hour in the oven, I took off the foil and returned the meatloaf to the oven for a further 30 minutes while I prepared some veges. At the end of this time, the meatloaf looked and smelled delicious.

You know what? It tasted delicious too! The meatloaf itself has a fairly standard sausagey flavour, but the star of the show is definitely the sweet, crunchy, almost caramelised topping. I only wish there were more of it. Better than Bryn's meatloaf with barbecue sauce? Hmmm.. not quite, but a close second!

Party of one

I went to a movie after work tonight, and so didn't get home until about 7.30pm. That said, I was conscious of not having made a blog post for quite a while, so I went looking for something quick an easy, so I could fill my hungry belly and write a short blog entry about it.

What could be quicker or easier than mousetraps (p193)? (By 'mousetraps' I do of course mean the cheese-on-toast sort, not the kind you actually kill mice with.) Somewhat unexpectedly, the recipe for mousetraps is found in the 'party finger foods' section. Since I don't see myself serving up mousetraps at a party in the near future (or ever, as a matter of fact), I figured I was quite safe to use this one tonight.

To begin with, I toasted a couple of slices of bread on one side only, while I assembled the rest of the ingredients. I finely chopped a small amount of onion, before mixing it with grated cheese. To go with this, I got out some salt, pepper, and a jar of relish. This was actually supposed to be chutney, but I didn't have any. Guess it might be a good idea to look at doing another chutney recipe in the near future eh?


When the bread was toasted on one side, I spread the untoasted side with relish, then topped it with the cheese and onion mixture before grinding over pepper and a small amount of salt. And after a short time under the grill, I had some gooey, tangy mousetraps to tuck into.

They were pretty good, as mousetraps go. The flavour of the mousetrap would of course depend on what kind of chutney or relish you use, but that won't matter as long as you use one you like. So as a quick, easy snack, mousetraps are a pretty tasty option. As party finger food: I still can't see it, can you?