The musings of a mad woman with a doughnut obsession!

Monday, November 14, 2005

Funnel Cake: the Doughnut’s Dutch Cousin

The First Annual L.A. Int'l Tamale Festival was as yummy as expected. Fred and I took the Goldline from Pasadena to Chinatown and met up with Susan, Caroline, Brian, Mykel and Angel. Because there were several of us there, we were able to try each other's food -- a great strategy for any food-centric festival. Between all of us, we ate A LOT of tamales. We had cheese and jalapeno tamales, Oaxaca style tamales, fancy-schmancy chicken cilantro tamales with a chipotle sauce, pork tamales, cinnamon raisin tamales, roasted corn, strawberry juice, horchata, kettle corn, and funnel cake!


While I have always seen funnel cake at carnivals, festivals, and amusement parks, I had never actually had any. Thanks to Susan, Caroline, and Mykel, I finally got to try some.

Funnel cake where have you been all my life?

According to Wikipedia, funnel cake is “a regional specialty food, originally associated with the Pennsylvania Dutch region of the United States. It is made by pouring batter through a funnel into hot oil in a circular pattern and deep frying it until golden brown. It is often served with powdered sugar, jam, or other toppings.

MMMM! Dough, oil, sugar. Same concept as a doughnut in an easier-to-share form! The only hazard associated with funnel cake is the flying powdered sugar that ended up all over Susan. We had the plain funnel cake with powdered sugar. I'’m not sure about the funnel cakes with the jam toppings. It seems like the jam would overwhelm the delicate freshly fried dough. Caroline likes the jam, so maybe next time we'’ll have to try that!

After the tamale-extravaganza, we took a long walk at the cornfields across the street to try to burn off some calories….ok it was mostly too ease our guilty, calorie-conscious minds, since we would actually have had to walk all the way home to Alhambra in order to burn off all those calories we ate. There's been some hoopla in the news that people were filming "porn in the corn" but we didn't see any. Only people trying to relax after their crazy tamale binge.

Hopefully there will be a second annual tamale festival. Funnel cakes, see you next year!

Here are some more pics:

posted by DeeDee at 2:44 PM

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