Miss Chessman's Cakes

Epic End of the Year Post

2011-12-28T08:03:00.000-08:00

I have been an epic failure as a blogger recently and for that I apologize. I blame NaNoWriMo. You try writing a 50,000 word novel in a month and keep up with your cake blogging as well.

I have found some magnificent recipes over the past two months that I need to share here.

Monster Cookies:
To begin with, I made the most amazing cookies of all time. They are from the Baked cookbook and are ridiculous. They are called Monster Cookies, so I made them for Halloween. I have made them once or twice since because they truly are amazing. The Monster Cookies are oatmeal, peanut butter, chocolate chip, M&M cookies. Yes, you hear right, all of those things go into one cookie. And they are amazing. They are not super sweet, especially considering what's in them, but they are gooey and chewy and chocolatey and delicious.

As we know, I have issues reposting recipes without permission, but luckily for your guys, everyone else in the world does not share my intellectual property concerns (damn librarianship!). Here is a link to the recipe on someone else's site.

I will admit that I messed with the recipe a little when I made them the second time. Shocking, I know. But in this case, all I did was add Reese's Pieces, in addition to the chocolate chips, M&Ms and all the rest of the stuff. They only made it more amazing.

The Salted Caramel Brownies
So, remember the Sweet and Salty Cake from a few months ago? You know, my masterpiece as a baker. Well, it turns out that the Baked boys have a salted caramel brownie recipe that uses that same salted caramel. So I made them. And somehow I didn't take a picture, which is really too bad because these brownies are maybe the most amazing brownies I've ever had.

The recipe for these aren't actually in my cookbook, I think it's in the second book they put out. I have the regular brownie recipe in my book though, and it turns out that to make the salted caramel brownies, you just put a layer of salted caramel in the middle before you bake them. I had some salted caramel left over from when I accidentally set off my smoke detector three times in one night, so I thought I'd make them.

The reason this recipe is so good is less because of the caramel (which is admittedly amazing), and more because of the 11oz of high quality chocolate and five eggs. It's actually the reason I am in the process of bankrupting myself with the purchase of Scharffen Berger chocolate. It really is so much better when you start with a high-quality product. Who knew?

Anyway, these are delicious. I made them again in lieu of a birthday cake for a coworker. They're pretty easy to make too, if you have a better knowledge of non-fire-inducing caramel chemistry than I do. Or if you already have the caramel in your fridge.

Here's a link to the recipe on some other rule-breaker's website.

The Double Chocolate Peppermint Crunch Cookies
So, it seems that I have no only been failing as a blogger recently, but also as a photographer, because I have no picture of these cookies either. I can link you directly to a website for the recipe for this one though, so I think I get points for that. These cookies were pretty amazing. They had the consistency of brownies on the inside, but the firmness of a cookie on the outside. I also used the better (Scharffen Berger) chocolate to make them. Also, from my perspective, there is very little you can do wrong with melted 60%+ chocolate, cocoa powder, chocolate chips and crushed candy canes.

The only thing that's persnickety about this recipe is that you have to drizzle the baked cookies with melted chocolate and then put on crushed candy cane pieces. That being said, it was a pretty easy recipe to make. I found these to be great to keep in the freezer. I had a last minute holiday party and was able to pull out a bunch of them and bring them over.

This is the picture from the Epicurious website. Mine actually looked pretty much the same.

The Chocolate Peppermint Chanukah Cake
At Thanksgiving, when I was all high on cooking and praise, I volunteered to make a cake for our family Chanukah party. Three weeks later, when it came time to make the cake, I was a little baked out, but I persevered! I was in a peppermint mood (see above and below), and decided to recreate the Zivah Lily cake, which I actually now know is a Baked recipe, even though I didn't know it then.

I made the cake and peppermint ganache. I used peppermint schnapps only in the ganache instead of a mixture of peppermint and creme de menthe. For the buttercream icing, I didn't have the energy to make the recipe from the book (which I now owned), and so I cheated. I am openly admitting this on the Internet too, so now everyone knows. I had some icings from previous recipes in my fridge, so I mixed it all together, added some butter, more sugar, a bunch of schnapps, and a large amount of blue food coloring. It actually came together quite nicely. It was remarkably fluffy and smooth.

I put the cake together with the three layers of chocolate cake, a layer of buttercream, layer of ganache, and so on. I frosted the whole thing with the ganache. The ganache

Not really sure how this next part happened, but I applaud my family for their sense of architecture and balance.

The Peppermint Gift Boxes
Each year at the holidays I give gifts to some of the people who work in my school. I strongly believe that by keeping the custodial and production center staff in sweets and treats makes my working life a far more enjoyable experience. Usually, I make chocolate peppermint fudge and it goes over well. One time I made chocolate-dipped candied grapefruit rind, but that didn't go too well. Turns out not everyone shares my slight obsession with grapefruit.

This year, I went with the old standby of fudge, but kicked it up a notch by adding white and dark chocolate peppermint bark as well. I also found some pretty silver cupcake boxes that were perfectly sized for the gifts. I boxed them up and they were met with great acclaim. I am happy to have done my part to keep people fat and happy this holiday season!

The Fougasse
In the French bread baking class I took in October, we learned how to make something called a Fougasse, which is basically a French focaccia. You make it by making two balls of dough and forming them into teardrop shapes. Then you put a bunch of garlic oil, blue cheese and rosemary on top of one layer and the second layer on top of that. The you coat that with some more garlic oil and yummy stuff and then you snip it in all kinds of snazzy ways until it turns into a leaf. It was actually pretty easy to make and tasted amazing.

This is the one I made in class:

And this is the one we made for Thanksgiving:

The Apple Pie
Remember in October when I dragged my friends apple picking? We went to that place in the middle of nowhere and there was a lot of traffic and then I forced them all to take a wide variety of ridiculous pictures and somehow ended up getting a bunch of apples chucked at me as I stood there innocently. My friends love me. (I know this because they continue to come apple picking every year as long as I organize it).

Anyway, you know that part that comes after apple picking when you get home and you have 8,000lbs of apples and you unload them all over your counter and then you kind of stare at them for a while. And they stare back. And you start imagining ways you can cook them and then you start imagining ways you can cook them without having to peel them because everyone knows that peeling apples is pretty much the worst thing ever? Well, this pie came right about then.

Honestly, I don't remember how I made the pie filling. It involved sauteing the apples with some brown sugar and I want to say either bourbon or spiced rum. Spiced rum is likely, because that sounds like something I'd like better with apples. I do know I used the best pie crust recipe in the world. It's the Cook's Illustrated vodka pie crust recipe. You put vodka in the crust because it does magic with the gluten content. That's right, it's magic. (Magic is what I call things like chemistry and math I don't understand). Anyway, here's the recipe and some pictures of my beautiful pie. Christmas weekend it finally got to come out of the freezer and get cooked. It was delicious!

Recipe:

2 1/2 cups (12 1/2 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon table salt
2 tablespoons sugar
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch slices
1/2 cup cold vegetable shortening, cut into 4 pieces
1/4 cup cold vodka
1/4 cup cold water

So, that's it for me in 2011. I'll be back on track come the new year!

Stop 28: Arizona Jalapeno Cheddar Cheesecake

2011-12-26T19:42:00.000-08:00

Hey, remember a long time ago when I decided to make every recipe in a particular cookbook and blog about it? Yeah, I'd forgotten about it too. But look, here's a new post. And it's all about cheesecake!

The cake for Arizona is a Jalapeno Cheddar Cheesecake. I assume this is because southwestern cooking is known for having smokey and spicy things in it, like jalapenos. This cheesecake was the most interesting cake I think I've ever made, not from the creation perspective, but more from the "when the heck would you serve this?" perspective.

I was going to a wine and cheesecake party (what's that you say, the best party idea you've ever heard of? me too), so I was all set with the where to bring it. I'm still not 100% sure when I would serve it in "real life" though. The thing is, it wasn't really sweet. And it wasn't really savory. It was the perfect mix.

The recipe calls for a corn chip crust, which follows the same general idea of a cookie crust, but with corn chips instead. It was pretty ingenious, and tasty. The filling was an interesting mix of chopped jalapenos (for which I totally asked the guy working at the bagel shop for plastic gloves so I wouldn't make the same mistake I made the last time I tried to chop jalapenos and then couldn't put my contact lenses in without crying in pain for two days), shredded cheddar cheese, cream cheese, and, well, sugars. There was turbinado sugar, white sugar and brown sugar. So it was sweet. But it was savory. And a little bit spicy. In actuality, it was kind of awesome.

You bake it in a 9x13" dish, which made the serving a little bit odd. Since I was bringing it to a party, I decided to cut it and plate it up before going. I topped each piece with a slice of fresh jalapeno, which Brown recommended to let people know what was in it. That part didn't seem to work, but it looked cute. It was met with great esteem as well. By the people at the party, my brother, my mom, the guy who works at the bar who ate half the container I had with me. My father wasn't a big fan, but you can't please everybody all of the time. I think I would make the recipe again, maybe for a brunch. Or a super bowl party. If it wasn't so aesthetically confusing, it might go well with chili. In any case, this one's going in the recipe box.

The Gravy (and the rest of Thanksgiving in photos)

2011-12-08T11:18:00.000-08:00

I know I'm a few weeks late with this and everyone is now onto thinking about other holidays, but I needed to talk for a few minutes about my Thanksgiving gravy.

My Thanksgiving gravy was AMAZING.

Gravy has always been a bit of my arch nemesis on Thanksgiving because I do a dairy-free t-day and everyone seems to write recipes filled with butter and cream. I decided to forgo everything I read and just go with my own knowledge and experience.

When I grill my turkey, I put it in a roasting pan (this is because without a roasting pan your grill will catch on fire. Trust me on this one.) and then fill the pan about a third of the way up with apple cider. As the turkey cooks, I refill the cider once or twice. The turkey steams in the cider and tastes even more delicious.

What I did to make the gravy this year was to take the neck, giblets and heart and put them in a saucepan covered in a mixture of water, boxed mushroom broth and fresh apple cider. I don't know the exact amounts, but it was enough to more than cover the meat. Then I brought it to a boil and let it simmer. For a long time. At some point I added some leftover chopped onion from the day before and a bunch of thyme that was also leftover.

When we cleaned out the second turkey, I added the innards from that one and more of the same liquids, brought it to a boil and let it simmer again. For a long time.

When I took the turkey off the grill (early, of course, because my turkeys are always done early), I took out the innards I had been cooking and added the liquid from the bottom of the pan, which was now apple cider and turkey grease. It was delicious. I strained the liquid through a mesh strainer and syphoned off most of the fat. I used the ice cube trick my grandma taught me.

Once it was strained and defatted, I put it back in the pan and whisked in about two tablespoons of flour. Then I let it simmer again. For a long time.

Eventually, as it was getting close to time to eat, I added about a tablespoon of cornstarch. I now know, from watching Paula Deen, that I should have whisked the cornstarch into something cold and then added that so it wouldn't clump, but because I didn't know that, I just whisked extra hard to get the clumps out.

I let it simmer until it was time to eat and it was delicious. It was a little bit sweet from the cider and a little bit salty from the meat and the consistency was outstanding. I was very proud of myself. I might have eaten some on pasta two nights later, but I'd never tell...

The gravy creation:

This glamorous picture was taken early on in the gravy-making process. Don't I look adorable?

I cleaned up for the grease-syphoning part.

And lacked confidence for the flour-whisking.

Here are some other fun turkey-day highlights:

My absurdly adorable nieces trying on their turkey hats

The turkey was tender enough to fall off the bone before carving.

Some of the sides (i.e. what we use the oven for on Thanksgiving)

This awesome chocolate pumpkin no-bake thing my chocolatier brother concocted.

Walk on the beach post-meal, pre-dessert (that's the dog, not the Loch Ness Monster, though I can see the confusion)

The answer to the question of whether I had a good time on Thanksgiving.
(Though I swear one of those was for someone else.)

Deep Fried Thanksgiving: one week out

2011-11-17T09:33:00.000-08:00

Since Thanksgiving is upon us and I reposted by holiday advice from '08, I thought I'd just go ahead and let you all into my crazy for a bit. In all honesty, my crazy now is nowhere near where it used to be a few years back. I have now learned how to let other people help me in the kitchen and take some of the responsibility. I have also learned about the benefits of the food processor and planning in advance. This way, I no longer have a nervous breakdown on Thanksgiving day and tell everyone that we're having turkey subs next year. (That happened a few years in a row, but without actually having the subs the next year).

I am a bit behind schedule with my T'day planning this year. I blame this mostly on attempting to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days (who chose November as National Novel Writing Month anyway?), taking a few classes and actually working at work.

Planning

To start planning for the T'day menu, I start by looking at old menus and recipes from previous years to see what worked and what didn't. Sometimes I like to switch stuff up, sometimes we have a lot of repeats. This year we are going to have some new faces at the table (food wise, the people are pretty much the same). I keep my menus and my recipes from year to year. I'll show you what those look like in a bit.

After I look at my old records, I start scouring the internets for fun new recipes that I think will add something to the meal. A lot of stuff out there seems to be reinventing the wheel, so I am pretty picky what I add to my menu. This year, I used my Pintrest boards to collect recipes and pictures I thought looked interesting and tasty. I love Pintrest.

Recipe-ing

Once I have figured out basically what I want to make, I set up a Word document to keep track of my recipes, their ingredients and directions.

I use two columns and put the ingredients in one side and the instructions on the other. This keeps me from having to keep flipping from page to page in a cookbook or magazine. Having all the recipes in one document is helpful, and numbering the pages keeps me organized. I have definitely found it useful to put the link of where the original recipe came from on the document. That way when I see that I transcribed something incorrectly, it's easier to figure out and I don't end up with a meat trifle.

After I have the recipes all typed up (or copied and pasted more likely), I print them out and go through the ingredient lists with highlighters. I highlight for produce, grocery and perishable. The next step is to make the grocery list, which I can now do easily because I have used my super organized color highlighting system. So, after I have scribbled a lot of written really coherent things like: 2 yellow onions +1+1+3, I come up with something that looks a bit like this:

Then I send the shopping list off to my parents. If you notice, there are no turkeys on my list. That is because buying the turkeys and figuring out how much we need is someone else's job. I just cook the stuff... I also write little notes in the shopping list and other intelligible things like: "Maple Syrup and whatever else we need to make this taste good." Then I cross out things I know we have and will now hope to remember to bring with me. It works for me.

Planning, part 2

So, the next part of planning is where the aforementioned food processor comes in. I used to make each recipe from start to finish without taking other recipes I was about to make as well into consideration. Two years ago I had an epiphany that if I figured out how much of each product I needed in advance, I could prep it all in advance. So, if I need 2 cups of diced onions for one recipe and 3 cups for another recipe, I can just dice up all the onions in advance and then scoop out what I need when I need it. It was quite a freeing revelation.

To do that, I go back to the recipe lists and start making notes again of the preparation of different items. The other thing this helps me do is actually read the recipes in advance. Then I am more likely (though now 100% determined) to avoid those persnickity little things like, "let this chill for 4 hours" two hours before the meal.

I should mention that none of this keeps me from having to go to the grocery store at 11pm on the Wednesday before, or from swearing a lot. At this point, I alter some of the recipes as I go, so I am not as careful as I should be about asking for specific ingredients. Another issue is always that it doesn't matter how much of something I have at home. If I forget to bring it with me to the Cape, where we do Thanksgiving, I'm still out of luck.

Oh, what's that you say? You still don't understand why this post is called Deep Fried Thanksgiving? OK, I'll tell you why. We're deep frying everything. Actually, that is a blatant lie. But we are deep frying a turkey, which we haven't done in a few years. And since we're getting the turkey fryer set up, I figured we should probably deep fry some other stuff. Like sweet potato fries, and fried pumpkin wontons. I had originally had a plan to make some sort of stuffing ball that was beer battered and then deep fried, but as the time gets closer, I seem to be getting nauseous every time I think about it, so we'll see. I have been on a deep-fried food ban for the past two months. It's actually been a bit harder than I thought it would have been. Something about not being able to reach over and grab a fry off someone else's plate that's just been painful. There are definitely some chive fries with blue cheese fondue in my post-Thanksgiving future.

So, that's all I've got for now. I'll have updates as we go along.

Oh, and by the way, I have no idea what this thing is, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to get one:

The Halloween Birthday Cake

2011-10-29T14:59:00.000-07:00

My nephew's birthday is in the beginning of November and every year I designate myself the official baker of his birthday party cake. Last year he had a Fiesta! theme party (with Zumba!), so I made the Fiesta! cake. The year before that there was the slightly disastrous Cupcake Penguin fiasco, for which I was only slightly able to redeem myself with the Iceberg Cake for our family celebration.

This year he was having a Halloween themed party and I volunteered to make the cake again. He informed me that he wanted a lemon cake, which I thought was a bit of an odd choice for a 10 year old, but I'm not going to ask anymore questions than I need to. I had just gotten the Baked cookbook when he mentioned that he wanted a lemon cake and I thought immediately of the Lemon Drop cake from the book. I then realized that making a three layer lemon cake with lemon curd filling and lemon drop boiled icing for a 10 year old's birthday party might be a bit much. So, I decided to make the cake from the recipe, but not do the rest. My nephew informed me that I could just decorate it with "a bat or something," which I thought was very kind of him.

But, I didn't do that.

Instead, I found this:

and I became obsessed.

Now, I am well aware of my limitations and the fact that I refuse to use fondant and gum paste because it tastes gross (and is confusing), but I decided to throw caution to the wind and use the cake from the website as my inspiration anyway.

I made the lemon cake from the recipe and it came out magnificently. I even used cake flour, because I found some in my cupboard. I am linking to the dessert girl blog because she got in touch with Matt Smith from Baked and got permission before posting the recipe, which I dig. Of course, I can't get Matt Smith to respond to anything I tweet at him, so it also makes me a little bitter.

I made a regular decorator's icing using half butter, half solid vegetable shortening, lemon juice, milk and vanilla. I discovered that if you follow a recipe, your consistency comes out a lot better. I filled the cake with the decorator's icing as well as frosted it with it. It's too sweet for me, but I figured it was going to be eaten by a bunch of kids who didn't belong to me, so I could get them as sugar-hopped-up as I wanted.

The cake was solid and took the frosting well. I have to say that I was really happy with how the cake came out. I worked my butt off and was on my feet for over two hours, but I've been doing so little real decorating recently that it made it worthwhile.

I put black cats and gravestones behind a creepy looking iron fence around the outside with some pumpkins and cobwebs, then on the top I put the lettering and a big cobweb and a little spider.

It was a lot of fun to make. I hear it tasted pretty good too!

Here are some pics:

meeeooowww

I think this is my favorite part.

The Peanut Butter Pie and the Sweet and Salty Cake

2011-10-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

I mentioned in my last post that I went out and bought this new cookbook giving me something to rave about on the blog for a while. I bought it in part because of what Edd Kimber had to say about it, but more importantly because I ended up with two birthday celebrations in one day. I had lots of creative plans for the cake for the birthday dinner I was going to, but once I heard about the Sweet and Salty cake, that settled it without a doubt. The birthday we were going to celebrate in the afternoon didn't even know it was getting a cake until I saw the recipe for the peanut butter pie. How could I see something called a peanut butter pie and NOT make it?

The peanut butter pie with cookie crust, as it's called in the book, called for a chocolate wafer, sugar and butter crust. I even got the cookies they recommended ( Newman's Own organic) because I was at Whole Foods anyway, and well, because I had a big crush on the cookbook authors. I had also bought the Whole Foods Groupon, so I was good to go.

I used my magic bullet to grind up the cookies. It doesn't work quite as well as a regular food processor, but it did the trick. They got mixed with the butter and sugar and put in the fridge. For the first layer of the pie, I mixed together the semisweet chocolate chips and light corn syrup in the double boiler and the spread it on the bottom of the pie as directed. The next step was to mix cream cheese (I used light), peanut butter (I used natural), vanilla extract (I used vanilla extract), and dark brown sugar together with the paddle in a stand mixer. Then, you take that out, put it aside and beat up some cream until it reaches soft peak. Then mix them together. Then you try not to eat all of the filling because it tastes really, really good. Then you put the peanut butter filling in the pie dish with the cookie crust and chocolate layer and put it in the freezer for up to three days.

The recipe called for a fudge sauce, which I didn't do since I was going to be serving the pie at the bar and that seemed awkward.

The only bone I have to pick with the recipe is that it said the pie cut clean from the freezer. I did not find that. The pie itself cut fine, but the crust was frozen solid and was very difficult to cut. It involved a lot of standing up and pushing down and accidentally projecting pieces of peanut butter pie across the table. When I make the recipe again (and I will be making this recipe again), I will remove it from the freezer in advance by about an hour or so and let it thaw a bit. Or use a better knife. In either case, it was fricken awesome.

The Sweet and Salty cake was a total putchke, and totally, 100% worth every ounce of its pain-in-the-butt-ness. I burnt two full batches of caramel before I finally got it right, and if I had to do that every time, I would. This cake was that good.

It was my friend Josh's birthday and it was a big one. I figured a big birthday needed a big cake. A spectacular cake. And a cake with footballs on it. Josh is a big football fan, it seemed called for. I'm not going to put the recipe on here since I'm a librarian and have issues with copyright, but since Edd Kimber doesn't seem to have the same issues (we'll see what happens when HIS book comes out), I'll link you to his page for it.

It took me three evenings to prepare everything for the pie and the cake. I made the pie in one night (it was pretty straight forward), and made the chocolate layer cakes the same night. These layer cakes are very impressive, they bake evenly and are quite tasty.

I also attempted to make the caramel for the salted caramel and whipped caramel ganache frosting on the first night. After burning two batches and setting off the smoke detector once, I gave up on that. On the first night I did also pipe white chocolate goal posts and stitching onto chocolate footballs (I will admit, I went a little crazy on this cake).

The second night I finally owned caramel. I discovered that I could not either wait for the sugar syrup to reach 350 degrees on a candy thermometer, nor wait for the syrup to be a dark amber color. I had to take the pot off the stove right when the syrup began to turn golden. It would then finish cooking in the pot off the stove and would get to the correct color. I never got it to 350 degrees. I also made the whipped caramel ganache frosting on the second night. It wasn't coming together as well as I had hoped it would, which I blamed on the Trader Joe's brand chocolate I had bought (it's was cheap!), but I think it had to do with the humidity in the kitchen. I popped it in the fridge and left it overnight.

The next day, after eating the peanut butter pie, I had to come home and put the cake together. The ganache was, of course, completely solid because that's what happens when you put something made with butter in the refrigerator overnight. I let it soften a bit while I mixed up the decorator's icing for the grass.

When the ganache was soft enough, I assembled the cake. I didn't find that the salted caramel absorbed into each layer of the cake as much as I'd hoped it would, so it seemed kind of soupy. I had outlined the top of each layer with the ganache using a piping bag though, so everything stayed pretty contained. I then filled in the circle I'd made with ganache on top of the caramel, sprinkled it with fleur de sel and put on the next layer. When all three layers were assembled, I crumb coated the way they instructed me to and then finished icing and decorating the cake with the grass icing, goal posts, footballs, and white chocolate lettering. I was a bit concerned that the icing was going to begin to melt again because of the humidity, so I asked them to pop it back in the fridge at the restaurant. They took it out about a half hour before we ate it and it was the perfect consistency.

All in all, that cake kicked ass. It really was the perfect combination of sweet and salty. I think it was worthy of the birthday number it was celebrating and quite honestly, all the steps and hours aside, I can't wait to make it again!

The New Cookbook

2011-10-13T07:00:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

I am cheating on Warren Brown (United Cakes of America).

I am cheating on Warren with Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito. They are the owners of Baked bakery in Brooklyn, and the author's of the cookbook Baked: new frontiers in baking. Their cookbook is spectacular. I learned about this cookbook from Edd Kimber's website. He is the Boy Who Bakes and has his own cookbook coming out soon. I got the recipe for Zivah's Grasshopper Cake from his website and discovered the other day that that recipe, among many others, actually came out of this book. So, I stopped at my local, neighborhood independent bookstore on my way home from work (yay, indie bookstores!) and picked up a copy. It is amazing.

Let me just list some of the recipes that are in this book:
sweet and salty cake and peanut butter pie, which I've now made.
Also, chipotle cheddar biscuits, pumpkin chocolate chip loaf, homemade granola, red hot red velvet cake (with cinnamon buttercream), lemon drop cake, coconut snowball cupcakes (coconut!!), ROOT BEER bundt cake, bourbon chocolate pecan pie, butterscotch pudding tarts, brownies (that are award-winning), shortbread, blondies with beer in them, monster cookies (with everything in them), and that's not even half the stuff! Seriously, this cookbook is like a salivation monster. And I don't even like sweets.

They also give adorable little suggestions, like about how to store stuff and easy decorations. The pictures are gorgeous and the end papers are downright outstanding.

endpapers - it's deer!

I have only made two of the recipes from this book, but I am completely enamored. I might even go to Brooklyn to see the bakery. OK, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.

Well done, Misters Lewis and Poliafito, well done indeed.

Posts and pics from the Sweet and Salty cake and Peanut Butter Pie are coming up next.

Adventures in Canning

2011-10-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

As the title of this post suggests, I recently went on an adventure in canning that was similar in extremes to Adventures in Babysitting. No, it didn't have any blues-singing. Or skyscraper-scaling. Or guys named Thor. Or babysitting for that matter. OK, it wasn't really the least bit like Adventures in Babysitting, but it did have kids, and I had to get you to read it somehow!

Some backstory: When my oldest brother decides he's going to do something, he goes all the way. This is the man who decided he wanted a wife, met a (lovely) woman, got engaged two months later, and was married about nine months after that. He decided he wanted some kids, now they're on the fourth. See, when he does stuff, he's all in, and he does it right. So, last year, when he decided he wanted to can stuff (oh yeah, he's also my antithesis. He's the country to my city, the tree to my telephone pole), he went out and got all the stuff he needed to can, and learned how to can all the way. Therefore, when I decided to learn how to can, it wasn't just a pot on a stove for me, I went to the home of the master. Besides, his kitchen is way bigger and way prettier.

Last year, I picked up some grapefruit marmalade at a farmer's market. It was delicious; sweet and tart at the same time. I haven't been able to find it anywhere, so I decided it was time to make it myself. I also decided, since I was launching into the world of unknown cooking, that I wanted to pickle asparagus as well. So, one weekend a few week ago, I went to my brother's house and canned stuff. We canned just about everything that wasn't screwed down. Of course, the only thing we didn't end up canning was asparagus, but that's because it's expensive in the fall and will have to wait until spring.

It seems, this city mouse learned, that pickling and canning are different. I guess I really knew that, but it was clarified that weekend. To make marmalade, you basically just have to make a big, sticky mess and then add more sugar than you ever want to see in one place (unless it's a Pixie Stick), and some pectin. To pickle things, you need to cook them, typically in some sort of solution involving sugar, water, and vinegar. To can things, you put them in fancy jars, clean their tops, put on lids and rings, and going against everything you've ever learned about boiling water and glass, you then dump the jars in a big pot of boiling water for a while and hope nothing explodes.

And you know what? Nothing explodes! It's like chemistry. Or something. In any case, it works. And then you have pickles and jams and stuff forever!

We made grapefruit marmalade (which isn't really congealy enough), pickled green beans (which I don't love), pickled carrots, cauliflower and onions (which are awesome), and bread and butter pickles (which are super awesome, and a pain in the hiney to make). The next week I went back and we made black forest jam (cherries and chocolate!), and apple, cranberry relish (yum!).

The best thing about the canned stuff is that it's so pretty. The worst thing is that I have no place to store any of it. The jar lids also get sticky and now I have a fridge filled with jars of half-eaten pickles that I can't open. I'll work on that.

Aren't they pretty?!

Stop 27: Florida Key Lime Pie

2011-10-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

So here's a good thing to know about me for anyone who decides that in a fit of retribution they suddenly want to bake for me: I love key lime pie. I know I go on and on about not being much of a sweets person, and maybe it's because the key lime has that tart limey flavor to its sweetness, but I would eat just about anything you could think of to make out of key lime juice. Pie, cheesecake, tarts, whatever you can think of. In Florida, in the grocery stores, they make a mango key lime pie, and they just have it there, waiting to be purchased and eaten. It's a good thing I don't go to Florida all that often.

Brown's recipe for Key Lime Pie, representing Florida, quite appropriately, was a pretty typical recipe. It is also probably the recipe of his that I messed with the most. I made this pie for a BBQ I was having with my cousins at the very end of the summer. All summer I was on something of a coconut kick, which led me to purchase Hawaiian Tropic suntan lotion (which is awesome), and spend many hours trying to find coconut-scented lotion. Basically, I wanted to spend the summer smelling something like a beach mixed with a pina colada.

Because of my coconut kick, I decided to kick up the key lime pie a notch. I made the graham cracker crust the way the book told me to, but I added some dried, sweetened coconut to the graham crackers and butter. The pie was pretty basic, sweetened condensed milk, key lime juice (Brown recommended Nellie and Joe's and it did not disappoint - available at Whole Foods, btw) and eggs. I left the custard filling alone. What I messed with the most, was the topping.

Brown wanted me to top the pie with a meringue. I refused. For one thing, I don't like meringue. For another, meringue does not belong on key lime pie, it's just not natural. I think it was Brown trying to find something to do with the whites of the eggs that weren't used in the pie. Whatever the reason, I went in another direction. I made fresh whipped cream. But I didn't just whip up some cream and sugar. No, I whipped up cream, sugar, vanilla seed, coconut rum and key lime juice. And I want to say right here and now, I would have bathed in that concoction. It was DELICIOUS.

Then I toasted up some dried coconut and sprinkled it on top. Seriously, key lime pie is probably one of the easiest things to make, and easiest things to make look really impressive. If anyone wants this recipe, just ask. It's worth sharing -- at least with my adjustments it is :-)

The pictures I took weren't the best, but here's the idea:

Next we're taking a diversion from the road trip and going on a canning adventure!

Stop 26: Hummingbird Cake

2011-10-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

About a week after making the Cassata cake, my mother had a dinner party to go to for which she wanted to bring dessert. She had some old bananas she wanted to use, and since I don't like bananas, and I wasn't going to this party, it seemed like a pretty good time to make one of the banana recipes from the book. We decided to make the Hummingbird Cake from, well, to be honest, I can't remember which state it was, and I can't find the book. I want to say it was South Carolina.

The hummingbird cake, which, by the way, has no given explanation for its name anywhere, except that it's super sweet, like the nectar a hummingbird drinks, was chock full of fruit. It called for pineapple and bananas, as well as pecans. A traditional hummingbird cake recipe calls for drained pineapple, but Brown switched his up to use dried pineapple. I'm not really sure why, but dried pineapple is yummy.

This was another three-layer cake and it came together nicely. The recipe called for a cream cheese frosting, and like many of the other icings I made over the summer, it didn't congeal quite the way we might have wanted it to. It was a pretty hot, sticky summer, so that was probably weather-related.

I did not actually try this cake (because of it's banana-ness), but I was told it was good. And very, very sweet.

I also have no pictures of it because I am currently failing miserably as a blogger.

Next Stop: Florida Key Lime Pie

DETOUR: Beer Cupcakes

2011-09-19T09:58:00.000-07:00

Recently, three things happened in my life pretty much simultaneously. My cousin was getting married at the same time that I discovered her future (and now) husband had a major thing for cupcakes at the same time that a friend sent me a recipe for beer cupcakes. I had been aware before that my cousin and her fiance were beer people from some time we had spent together (and the fact that they just seem awesome), so the idea of creating something that combined two of their favorite things (and my favorite things) seemed like a great way to kick off their wedding weekend.

Now, most baking that includes beer involves chocolate flavors and stout beers. These cupcakes included some IPA and honey. The recipe called for a strong, flavorful IPA and I chose a beer called Hoppy Feet from the Clown Shoes Brewery. It was described as a Black India Pale Ale and had a reasonably high percentage. I figured that the higher the percentage, the stronger the beer, the more the flavor would come through in the cupcakes.

I guess I was right, though it was kind of hard to tell. To be honest, the cupcakes kind of tasted like banana bread when they were cooked. Not because of the banana flavor (of which there was none), but because of that moist and mildly slimy consistency. As someone who does not like bananas and is mildly repulsed by the scent of baked bananas, this was not an altogether welcome turn of events. Some people who tasted them said they could taste the beer flavor, but only if they'd already been made aware of the secret ingredient beforehand. The flavor was fine, it just wasn't really beer-y, which I was disappointed about. Come to think of it, I once made a beer bread that also wasn't really beer-y, so maybe it's just something about my expectations and beer in baking...

For the icing, the original recipe called for lavender honey icing. I like flowery flavors in foods even less than I like banana bread (well, it might be a tie), so that didn't go over too well. I made two ganaches. I made a dark chocolate ganache with cinnamon and ginger, and a white chocolate ganache with chamomile, rose hips and mint. I actually used a bag of Tazo Calm tea that I ripped open and let brew in the cream as I was heating it to pour over the chocolate. The flavor of the white chocolate ganache was very good, but it didn't set up the way I hoped it would, so I ended up adding a bunch of powdered sugar that eventually helped it set. It was very sweet. The dark chocolate ganache was very tasty and went way quicker than the white chocolate, but isn't that always the case?

All in all, I might have been mildly disappointed in the outcome of the actual cupcake, but the bride and groom were quite pleased and all the cupcakes disappeared off the serving plate. Now that I have been opened up to this idea of beer in baking, I have lots to experiment with. I'm thinking that next time, the beer goes in the icing!

The bride and groom seemed to enjoy the cupcakes!

Here was the display of the amazingly delicious cupcakes they had at their wedding.
The Grasshopper ones were to die for!

Next Stop: Hummingbird Cake!

Stop 25: Ohio Cassata Cake

2011-09-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for the extreme lacking of posts recently, I'm back now, with lots to update you on!)

You know how sometimes get an idea and you're really motivated to do it right then and there? And then you start getting into it and you realize that it's a way bigger deal than you thought it was going to be? That is what the Cassata Cake was.

I was going to a friend of the family's for dinner and thought, gosh, wouldn't it be nice if I made a cake as a dessert... I had been looking through the book with this friend the night before and we both marveled at the cassata cake, so it seemed like a good one to try out. Here's what I learned: The cassata cake is awesome. It is also a cake that should not be started at 4pm for a casual weekday dinner. I learned this when I was halfway through in the intricate (and time-consuming) baking process and again at the end when Brown described the cake as "extravagant."

The best part of this cake, though, was the karma.

The cake called for citrus oil and we searched far and wide to try to find some sort of citrus oil. OK, we went to two stores, but we were on the Cape and there really weren't a lot of gourmet food stores in the area. Except for one. This fancy oil place that calls themselves a "tasting shop" and wants you go in and fill these little tiny cups with oils and vinegars that they normally charge somewhere between $12 and $15 for an enormous bottle and stick your finger in or drink them or something. So we did that for a while and then, right when I was thinking about buying one of the overpriced bottles of oil my mother nudged me. She nudged me kind of hard and in that, "don't pay that much for lemon-flavored oil, you silly girl!" kind of way. So, I made our excuses and went on my way. Once we left the store, I discovered that the reason for the nudge was not the price, but the fact that my mother had filled one of the little tasting cups with oil and left the store. Now, officially, if you think about it, we hadn't done anything wrong. I mean, we were going to TASTE the oil later, in the cake... But anyway, that kind of set the tone for the cake and what happened to it later might have been retribution.

The cake actually came out quite well and the ricotta filling was super tasty. Light, yet rich, very scrumptious. We had some strawberries, sliced them up, whipped the cream, everything was good to go. Time was going very quickly and the cake seemed to be cooling very slowly and we had to go to dinner. When I went to assemble the cake, a few things happened.

For one, I filled the cake with a layer of the ricotta filling and then a layer of strawberries, then I put the second layer on and it ended up a bit on the slippery side. The second thing was the whipped cream, which I had whipped previously and then, for some unknown reason, left out on the counter. Even when I was frosting the cake with the cream, I could tell that it needed to be rewhipped and wasn't really going to set correctly. But, I was out of time and didn't have the energy to get the (now clean) mixer out again. So I built the cake and we fashioned the ingenious little contraption to get it over to the place we were having dinner (otherwise known as a box).

And this is when the karma came around to bite me in the butt. On the way to the friend's house for dinner, this happened:

Needless to say, the cake did not appear as beautifully as I hoped it would. I am happy to say though, that it tasted really, really good. I will definitely be trying this one again when I have more energy, more time and less bad karma coming my way.

And here is a picture, not of the finished cake, which was just plain ugly, but of the cake before the whipped cream fiasco. Isn't it pretty?

Next Stop: Detour to beer cupcakes!

Stop 24: Texas Sheet Cake

2011-08-08T11:21:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who lives in Templeton, Mass. (wherever the heck that is) had a BBQ last week so we could all get together with another friend who was in town visiting. For simplicity's sake, I will tell you their names. Jenna is the one who lives in the middle of nowhere, and Sarah was the one visiting. That's better.

Jenna, Sarah and I went to grad school together and are all school librarians. It's a pretty wild time when we all get together. Jenna and Sarah are both native Virginians, but last year, Jenna saw the light and moved back up here with her fiance (Adam), who I like. Sarah was living in Virginia (which is for lovers), but in a few weeks is making a huge move to Texas. She will be living in a town midway between Austin and San Antonio and now I have a reason to go to Austin to visit (I've always wanted to go to Austin).

Now that you have the backstory, I should probably get on to the cake. Since Sarah is moving to Texas, it seemed like a perfect time to make a Texas sheet cake. I had had a Texas sheet cake once before when a coworker brought one in and knew it was a good cake for feeding a lot of people. It was a good sized BBQ too, which was good because now that I've been to Templeton and know where Templeton is and know I will never be returning to Templeton, it was nice to be able to bring a cake that would feed all of Jenna and Adam's friends, who were nice.

Texas sheet cake is a chocolate cake with chocolate icing that is big and sweet and Brown says, a good way to feed a crowd. Brown says that the recipe is sometimes attributed to Lady Bird Johnson, but he couldn't find any record of a recipe of her's for it, so I'm not sure where it came from.

The recipe itself calls for pretty traditional ingredients. It's a buttermilk cake, and calls for brandy, which I subbed bourbon for because I had bourbon and not brandy and it was only a tablespoon. I made the chocolate pecan icing, which I used walnuts for instead because the mediocre Star Market next to my house had no pecans at all. I used walnuts for the icing and the candied nuts that went on top. Those were yummy. I wasn't super impressed with the icing because I didn't feel like it ever really set, which was the same issue I had with the icing for the sauerkraut cake. I might not be beating it long enough, or it might have to do with the humidity, which has been rampant recently.

The cake itself baked up nicely and was very moist. It combined with the icing and candied nuts was very, very sweet, but that's what a dessert is for, right? I thought it came out well and was tasty, though, as I mentioned above, I was disappointed with the icing and might try a different one if I did it again. All the people who actually eat dessert seemed very pleased with it.

Pictures!

candied walnuts

Sarah and her Texas cake

Clayton, Jenna and Sarah looking creepily salaciously at the cake

and now with looks of deep admiration

Next Stop: Ohio Cassata Cake

Stop 23: St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake

2011-08-03T06:00:00.000-07:00

So, all I know about St. Louis is that it is in Missouri, there is an arch there, beer is cheaper than it is here, and I'm pretty sure the Mississippi River is involved, though I'm not 100% sure on that one. Missouri is one of those strange "middle-of-the-country" states that awes me because even though I've seen them on maps and met people "from" them, I'm really not completely convinced in their reality. What I do believe in though, is gooey butter cake.

My friend Anne, who is from the aforementioned "St. Louis," recently got married (to a guy from Pennsylvania, but I believe in Pennsylvania - they have airport hubs there), and at the wedding, they gave away St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake as a thank you gift. When Anne first told me this I imagined all her mom's friends slaving over hot ovens in July and then delicately transporting hundreds of ooey, gooey cakes from the midwest to Massachusetts and putting them into our greedy hands. What actually happened is that somebody bought a bunch of Gooey Louie cakes in bulk and put them in pretty boxes for us. So now I know one more thing about St. Louis: they have prepackaged gooey butter cakes so you can take them home from 7/11 with you after a long day at work. And the St. Louis area code is 314.

Brown presents gooey butter cake as one of the two Missouri cakes (the other is 7-Up Pound Cake). He explains that what makes it so gooey is that it's basically a butter cake with a cheesecake poured on top and then baked together. Because of this, the cheesecake topping seeps in and down the sides and makes the rest of the cake, which is already rich and delicious, pretty gooey.

I guess the gooey butter cake was first invented by a guy named Johnny Hoffman who accidentally added the wrong proportion of ingredients to a cake and ended up with baked, but gooey cakes. The problem wasn't the gooey-ness, it was that he liked them so much that he wanted to be able to recreate them, but didn't know what he had done. He called in his friend Richard Danzer and together they came up with what is now known as St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake. And we thank them.

I baked these last week in honor of a BBQ I was going to be attending with some cousins. Who else to inundate with overly sugary, fatty goodness than family?!

As mentioned above, these are literally made with two separate batters. First you make a butter cake recipe with butter, shortening, buttermilk, vanilla bean seeds, some flour, sugar, milk, eggs, baking powder and salt. Once that is mixed up and in the cups (I made cupcakes), you then mix together cream cheese, powdered sugar, vanilla, eggs, and milk. Brown also gave variations to add to the cheesecake mixture. I did half chocolate (which involved adding melted bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate, and some more butter), and half with peanut butter (for that you just added peanut butter).

Brown said the recipe would yield 18 cupcakes, but I got about 26 out of it. I assume either I was using smaller cupcake tins than he was, or I did something wrong (either option is a possibility). The cheesecake topping was also really soupy, almost pure liquid, which was a bit weird, and I ended up with a lot more of it leftover than I expected. Basically, by the time I put these things in the oven, I was pretty sure they were going to be a bust and I was going to be showing up to the BBQ with a store-bought cake and a scowl.

I was wrong though! They came out awesome. The top set right at the same time that the bottoms were cooked through and the result was literally a gooey cake that was rich and sweet and delicious. The peanut butter version were definitely the better option of the two, but I had no problem moving either flavor. In fact, there were about eight of us at this BBQ, and I came home with two cupcakes, and those were mostly because I ran away with them before they were absconded with.

The pictures are subpar because they were taken outside at night with an iPhone, but you should get the idea.

Yum.

Next Stop: Texas sheet cake!

A Summer Dinner

2011-08-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

In my world summer equals grilling. It hasn't always been that way; growing up we had an old gas grill which did its duty once or twice a summer. Through the years though, summer cooking has become synonymous with firing up the grill and using it to its fullest. Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while are familiar with the my grilled apple cake , my niece's second birthday cake, and of course we've been known to whip out the grill at odd times of year to create a plethora of grilled Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas roasts (most of which have caught the grill on fire at one point or another). I think the grill fascination came mostly when my mother retired from a job she'd been at for many, many years and as a gift they gave her a beautiful six-burner Weber gas grill which was installed on the deck at the house on the Cape with a direct line to the gas in the house. All of a sudden having access to a grill whenever you needed it, and with very little difficulty involving making it go, made the idea of grilling far more appealing and accessible. Thus was born the summer=grill phenomenon in my world. It kills me because I don't have a grill at home. Of course, I don't have the beach three miles away at home either, so there are lots of things bringing me down here.

Anyway, the dinner we've created today is an example of the perfect summer meal in my eyes. Fresh ingredients, some of them even local (I try!), turned into dishes made from scratch. We did use the oven a bit for this one, but mostly, the grill was used to its fullest to make a meal of new and delicious delicacies!

Dinner tonight was brought to us by the color green (you know, like on Sesame Street, the numbers and the Count, you know what I'm talking about...). July brought the grilling issue of Bon Appetit and everything in it looked amazing.

For this meal, we made three recipes from the magazine:
Green Shawarma Salmon,
Celery, Apple and Fennel Slaw,
and Cilantro-Scallion Bread

For dessert, a blueberry cake on the grill.

The cilantro scallion bread is a funny recipe. It's a yeast dough that you make like a pastry dough. You start by proofing the yeast with sugar and water, but while you're doing that, you cut butter into flour. It was a bit counterintuitive. After it had risen for an hour, you rolled the dough out and filled it with a mixture of cilantro, scallions, sesame seeds (it called for white and black, but I could only find white, so I did white and some toasted), and olive oil. Then you rolled it up, cut it into 3/4" slices and laid them flat on a baking sheet where they were brushed with even more oil and then baked. They were really good. Needed a bit more salt, but were really good.

(sorry about the sideways photo)

The next recipe was the Apple, Celery and Fennel Slaw. BA advertised this as their updated version of Waldorf Salad, and while the thought (and crunch) was there, my father disagreed that it really took anything from the original Waldorf Salad. That, for the most part though, is because my father loves all things mayonnaise and I think became fearful that we were going to start replacing all his mayo favorites with light olive oil vinaigrettes (we're not). I would happily say this salad was inspired by the original, but maybe not a replacement of.

This salad was also incredibly good and gave us a chance to use the brand spanking new mandoline to cut everything very, very thin. The mandoline we still need to work on, but it did speed up the process significantly. My only recommendation for the slaw off what they say in the recipe would definitely be to let it sit for at least a few hours before serving. It didn't say anything about time in the recipe, so we made it just a half hour before and the leftovers definitely tasted better the next day.

It was pretty too (and green):

The final BA recipe was the Green Shawarma salmon. This also came out really well and much better than it happens to look in the picture below. It basically involved blending a while bunch of cilantro with a whole bunch of olive oil and a whole bunch of spices (coriander, cinnamon, cardamom, and ginger). Then you spred the marinade on the fish and let it rest for a few hours. BA said that you were supposed to flip the fish while cooking which, I think, is why their picture looks so different from mine. Either that or I did something wrong. Either way, it was tasty. And also super tasty the next day when cold.

Finally for the anomaly of the meal, the Blueberry Cake dessert. The blueberry cake was the same recipe as the aforementioned grilled apple cake, but with blueberries rather than apples. I don't know if it's the grill or it's just that some baking master is hanging out at the Weber kitchen writing recipes, but this cake is beyond good. It's fluffy and dense and light and moist. It has all thing going for it that a cake should have going for it. If you have a grill, MAKE THIS CAKE, you will not be disappointed. And if you are disappointed, please bring it to my house and I will eat it. Thank you.

So that was our green-inspired, Bon Appetit and Weber discovered summer meal. It was light, tasty and didn't heat up or stink up the house. If I could eat like that every night, I would...

Stop 22: Colorado Apple-Banana-Walnut Nugget Cake

2011-07-18T18:41:00.000-07:00

We had a potluck brunch on the last day of school. I organized it and subsequently threw my back out at some point during the preparations. I also promised all of my colleagues many more potluck-esq types of events in the future, but as that I am now planning my big escape to Belgium or Paris or somewhere in the middle, who knows how inspired I'll be to get people to bake. On that note, does anyone want to pay me a bunch of money to go to Paris for a year and just kind of hang out? I have been looking at jobs there and I think that that would be a far superior alternative. Let me know...

Anyway, we had a potluck and it seemed like the perfect time to make a cake that I had no interest in eating. This pretty much means either something with peaches or something with bananas. I chose a banana recipe.

The Apple-Banana-Walnut Nugget Cake was created to honor Colorado because of Brown's association between a trip he took to Colorado as a child when he was shocked by all the small "nuggets" of rock were there (he was expecting large boulders and that's it) and Colorado's history relating to the gold rush. He chose apples, bananas and walnuts because they were good for holding the soft cake together.

I should acknowledge at this point that I don't have any pictures of this cake. I forgot to take them before and then I went home all whimpery-like because of my back and forgot to take them half way eaten as well. If you don't want to read anymore without the promise of visual stimulation, I completely understand.

The cake itself consisted of the normal cake ingredients plus some sour cream, heavy cream and brandy. There were also four eggs and three egg yolks thrown in for good measure and a bit of cholesterol. The recipe called to leave all the fruit pieces pretty chunky, as to make it nugget-y. Then you put on not one, not two, but three glazes. First white - powdered sugar and milk, then tan - the white one mixed with some melted chocolate, then brown - just melted chocolate. It truly was a sight to behold. I was also told that it tasted good. All I can tell you from personal experience is that I'm even more repulsed by the scent of baking bananas than I am of raw ones...

Next Stop: St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake. I had a packaged one at a wedding and I want to see how it compares!

Stop 21: Washington D.C. Cherry Trifle

2011-07-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

I have been a very bad blogger, I apologize profusely. The end of school happened and then my back pain and then Europe and well, I have been a very bad blogger indeed. I am back at it though and hopefully will have lots to regale you with soon! It has been a bit too hot to do much baking recently (though there was quite a bit of experimenting with baguettes right after I got home from Europe), but I am hoping to jump back in for a BBQ I have next week. In the meantime, some catch-up!

Right before the end of the school year, my mother hosted her book group meeting. The book they read was Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, which is really quite a nice book if anyone's looking for anything to read. She asked me to make something for it and we determined that few things get much more English-y than a trifle, even if it is out of the ultimate American cookbook...

Brown chose a cherry trifle for D.C. in honor of the cherry trees that are so prevalent down there. I'm not sure how he decided on a trifle for their vehicle though. It was a pretty basic recipe, but with a few extra tricks thrown in. Brown called for his "Amazing Vanilla Cake" recipe for the cake layers, but I had some leftover vanilla cake in the freezer and used that (remember when I said I would never deviate from the exact recipes? HA!). Brown's trifle recipe calls for sugaring the cherries. This basically means to dump the pitted cherries in with some sugar and apple cider vinegar and let them hang out in the fridge for a few hours. When all that is done, he has you make a simple syrup and add the juices that have come out of the soaking cherries to that. Then you soak each layer of cake with the simple syrup before putting in the whipped cream and sugared cherries. Brown also required the whipped cream to be very loose, so it all kind of blends together. I think I understood his reasoning, but in the future, would probably whip it up more. I prefer a firmer texture over his aesthetic preference.

I discovered a cute trick for pitting cherries during this process. By gently pushing of the point of a corkscrew through the top of the cherry (where the stem was), the pit slipped right out the bottom of the cherry and didn't leave a very big hole. This was good because part of the appeal of the trifle was how the cherries looked with the layers of cake and cream.

It was very tasty, though with those ingredients, I can't imagine how it wouldn't have been!

Europe! (part 2)

2011-07-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

After Bruges we headed for three days in Amsterdam. We got there by train, got kicked out of a first class carriage on said train, made our connection in Antwerp and eventually found our hotel. We had a bit of confusion with finding hotels because what could be better than being lost in a new city filled with pick pockets and tourists while schlepping 800lbs of luggage? Nothing!

The first day we were in Amsterdam it was really hot, like 90's hot. And my back hurt. That day involved a lot of walking around and looking at things, going into air conditioned stores and finding places to stop and have the magical European iced tea (it's fizzy!). We saw some sights and then did our normal afternoon siesta. When we went back out for dinner, it looked approximately like the apocalypse was upon us, so we ended up going to an Argentinian steak place much closer to the hotel than where we had originally planned. It was good because the skies opened, the winds howled, men clung to their beers under sidewalk table umbrellas for dear life, water sloshed in through the windows and doors, it was outstanding. And broke the humidity.

The next day we went straight to the Anne Frank house after breakfast. It was rainy and cold, but there was still a line. From there we hit the Jewish History Museum, had some falafel for lunch, did the Portugese Sephardic Synagogue, and I dragged my mom to the American Hotel to see the architecture. Then we discovered hop-on-hop-off canal boats and bought 24-hour tickets for those. It was a good call, because the sun had come back out and things were heating up. I had the best crepe of my life at a place called Hansel and Gretel and then we took a mini tour on the canal boat through the city. That night for dinner we went to a Thai place in the Red Light District which had been talked up by the tour books. It was busy and the orchids were beautiful, but the food was only so-so. We then walked through the Red Light District and had some amusing conversations about the fact that we were walking through the Red Light District as mother and daughter and I taught my mom the difference between coffee shops and those coffee shops as we walked by.

We started off day three by going on the longest canal boat leg that went to the outermost canal in the city and saw some sights that way. Then we did the Van Gogh Museum, found the cafe we had wanted to go to for lunch which was closed for renovations, ate more falafel, found the flower market, hit some stores, and located the restaurant at which we wanted to eat dinner - we were getting smarter! After that afternoon's siesta we hit Kapitein Zeppos which was awesome. Totally quirky interior, excellent food, funny waiter. It was great! On the way back we literally spent our last four euros (on water and iced tea). It was sad knowing the vacation was coming to an end.

lunch and iced tea

mom in a shoe

some beers

Bird, the Thai restaurant

Our hotel was made up of four canal houses

at Kapitein Zeppos with some more beer

Kapitein Zeppos interior

rain storm on the first night

statue of Anne Frank at the Westerkerk next to the Anne Frank house

interior of the American Hotel Cafe

Mom and me waiting for the canal boat tour

And that was that. The next day we hopped a flight back to Boston and it was like we'd never left. Unfortunately, I now have the crazy travel bug and can't wait to go back again!

As mentioned before, I came back to a week of extreme back pain and then was in a wedding on the weekend. The wedding was incredible, but of course, took up a fair amount of time. From mani-pedi on Thursday to the catered Four Seasons lunch on Friday afternoon to the rehearsal dinner at Silvertone on Friday night to prep and the actual wedding on Saturday, it was a jam-packed weekend. Also a weekend in which I learned that one should no drink beer, gin and champagne all in one night. Or at least not without a fair amount of cold pizza in the fridge for the next morning.

This was the wedding of my friend Anne (of guest post fame ) and her fiance Ben. The wedding had a peacock theme and everything was done beautifully. And Anne is a vegetarian who doesn't really like vegetable, so there was a pasta bar, which was awesome. I don't have a lot of pictures from the wedding, but here are a few that show how creative and beautiful everything was.

This is actually two bridesmaids bouquets mixed together.

Anne's mom made one of these bags for every out of town guest. They're adorable and have the Make Way for Ducklings ducks on them! And were jam-packed full of yummy goodies.

And that's that. Now, the trip is over and the wedding is over and I guess I have to go back to the real world. Oh wait, I'm a teacher on summer vacation, the real world is the beach!

I'll be posting about the cherry trifle and golden nugget cake soon!

An Actual Side trip - to Europe! (part one)

2011-07-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

I realize I haven't posted in quite a while. The past few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind for me. School ended, I pulled something in my lower back, went to Europe, came back, was jet lagged, and then, just to top it all off, was in a wedding last night. It's been a crazy three weeks, but things are finally settling down. Here are some of the highlights:

On the last day of school for teachers (which is the day after the last day of school for students) every year there is a big school-wide meeting. I refer to this meeting endearingly as the "Kumbaya meeting" because it seems to be a day for people to get up and tell other people how much they love them. It's actually very nice and gives people a chance to honor others in a public forum. This year, I asked the principal if we could combine the meeting with a potluck breakfast. I used LuckyPotluck.com to create a list of what was needed and have people sign up for those things. There was a ton of food, it was wonderfully successful, and it was also where I seemed to have thrown out my back. Because of that last part, I ended up leaving the school for the summer feeling a bit ill-at-ease. But I had also discovered that many of my colleagues can certainly cook, so we will be doing some major pot-lucking again in the future.

Two days after school ended, my mother and I left for a seven-day trip of Europe. We took about 250 pictures, which I will not post here, but the whole thing was incredible, bad back and all. And let me tell you, walking and biking around Europe for seven days is not the way to heal a bad back.

The trip started in Paris where we spent our first day, right off the plane, sans sleep, wandering around, climbing up to Sacre Couer, finding and adorable street filled with cafes (Rue de Cadet), getting misplaced looking for an Miro exhibit (we were literally in the wrong place, not lost), tripping over the Eiffel Tower, and accidentally eating (and paying for) two entrees at dinner rather than one. Our hotel was adorable, the room being in the garret of an old Parisian building with a view of the Eiffel tower in one direction and Sacre Couer in the other. Paris was a quick and slightly exhausting (and exhausted) day, but absolutely lovely.

Mom and me at the Sacre Couer steps

Our balcony

Paris hotel (the window allll the way at the top was our room)

The next day was our trip to Giverny, where Monet lived and painted, and the real reason for our trip. We had arranged a bike tour through Fat Tire Bike Tours which my mom had read about in the newspaper and did not disappoint. The day started with meeting at the Gare Saint-Lazare to catch a train to Vernon, the town next to Giverny. We did not miss our train, but only just. In Vernon, we got out bikes and then we to a open market to buy lunch which we then biked to a spot on the Seine to eat. Then we biked to Giverny (nice smooth bike trail and a little hill at the end) and had a few hours to see the house and gardens. They were amazing. Then we biked back, caught a train back to Paris, we home, fell asleep, woke up, ate dinner and packed because the next day we were leaving for Belgium! I do want to give a little plug to the bike tour company here because I thought it was pretty incredible. It's an American company that runs all sorts of tours in London, Barcelona, Paris, and Berlin. Our tour guide (Meghan) was knowledgeable and sweet and very helpful. It was well planned and the bikes were comfy. There is about a 25% chance that I am going to quit my job and go give bike tours of Europe for the rest of my life. I'll keep you posted.

Meghan giving bike instructions

Our picnic by the Seine

Mom and me at Giverny

Yummy crepes for dinner that night!

We made our train to Brussels very, very early and ate about three breakfasts in the meantime. By the way, I should take a moment to point out that everything in Europe is very expensive right now. Like, you sit down and order a coffee and then realize you've just paid seven dollars for it. But you're on vacation, so you just kind of go with it. It's a really great way to get really poor, really quickly. Anyway, we made our train to Brussels with no issues. We also eventually made it onto our train to Bruges, though having ticket machines in the Brussels train station that do no accept cash or credit cards was a bit sneaky. And mean.

In Bruges, once we found our hotel (which was a converted barge and adorable), we met up with my friend Tom who was in Belgium on business. I loved Bruges. It was an adorable, totally navigate-able city with tons of history and shops and bikes and tourists. It didn't really need more than a day or two, but for some reason, I want to live there and stay there forever. Mom, Tom and I used the Rick Steve's Snapshot Bruges (big shout out for Rick Steves!) to take a tour of the city, see all the sights, check out the brewery, find a closed restaurant (that should have been open), and then finally find one of the best restaurants we ate at on the trip, amusingly called Tom's Diner.

The next day, it was just mom and me in Bruges and we rented bikes from the hotel and went on a journey to Damme, a small town about five miles away. There wasn't much to Damme, but it was a very nice ride and very nice to be on a bike since we had done so much walking the day before. At this point, my back was still in pretty bad shape, but biking seemed better than walking, at least until I got off the bike... After Damme we went to some chocolate shops and boutiques, a park called Minnewater, found a lace shop, and had a light dinner. I should also mention that for some reason in these parts of Europe, the sun does not go down until the break of dawn. Or at least about 10:00-10:30. Because of that, it makes a lot more sense to eat dinner between eight and nine. And because of that, it makes a lot of sense to nap between five and eight. These Europeans are really onto something.

My favorite picture!

Bruges canals

At the Chocolate Line - chocolate place with crazy flavors

De Halve Maan brewery

View down the canal from Damme to Bruges

Amsterdam and wedding in part two!

Hometown stop: Go Bruins!

2011-06-15T17:45:00.000-07:00

I decided to make a quick stop in the city that is nearest and dearest to my heart (and physical location), good old Boston, and make some cookies to support the Bruins' run for the cup tonight. I figured a few Bruins cookies would be sure to set them in the right direction, and lessen the mood of high stress-crazy children at work in these last few days of the school year.

I also thought I'd take the easy way out by using slice-and-bake sugar cookies for some of them. For the rest, I wanted to make the chocolate cookies from the dirt cake because they were way too good to just use for crumbling.

I made icing with my very specific recipe for decorator's frosting: 2lbs confectioners sugar, 2 sticks of butter, and enough milk and vanilla to get it to the consistency you want it at. I also picked up some "electric yellow" and "super black" gel icing color, and a sparkly gel icing pen. I frosted some of the cookies with the pen and then, for fear that they wouldn't ever dry (does corn syrup mixed with sugar and fructose actually dry?), so I switched to regular icing. The pen ones did come out prettier though.

All of the cookies came out well because, well, one set came out of a tube, and the other's are just yummy. I left out one egg yolk because I ran out of eggs, and cooked them at a higher temp than called for, because my oven doesn't stay lit at 300, so they came out somewhat cakier than they had before, but they were delightful. Someone at work described them as a mix between a cookie and a brownie and coined the term, "brookie." This was after figuring out that "cownie" didn't sound quite right.

I have not being doing a lot of detailed decorating recently and I think I had forgotten what it was like. I had forgotten about being extremely covered in icing that feels like pure grease and looks like egg yolks when you don't boil them quite long enough. I had also forgotten how long it takes to decorate 32 cookies, how much clean up there is and what happens to your back when you stand for 3 hours to painstakingly put a Boston Bruins logo on to every cookie using multiple colors and tips.

Yes, I am complaining. It was worth it this morning because everyone at work was really happy. We will see if my good mojo worked in a few hours.

I am not overwhelmingly pleased with the actual detail work, but then, when am I ever pleased with what I create? I always have images of grandeur in my head and think I'll be able to create them with little training, little practice and icing that isn't quite soft enough. Oh well.

Close up of one with the gel pen.

These are the ones with the regular icing. They look better in the picture.

Decorated with the gel pen.

Go Bs!

Too Hot in Boston

2011-06-08T15:31:00.000-07:00

What do you do when it's 85 degrees in Boston at 5:30pm and you've spent the whole day in a non-air conditioned library with adolescents who have yet to buy into the concept of deodorant?

You make a drink. Preferably a frothy, cold drink. With ice. And gin.

So, on my way home, I stopped at the store about bought (what seems to be) the most enormous cucumber in the world, and some fake lime juice. Please don't mock my plastic lime shaped lime juice. It's not my fault that there are no limes to be found in a 10 mile radius of Brookline.

I had seen Ina on the Barefoot Contessa make a cucumber yogurt dip for which she shredded the cucumber and the squeezed out all of the water so the dip wouldn't get watery (which explained so much about my past dips). I saw this and thought, what a great thing to make a gin cocktail with! The cucumber water, not the shredded cucumber, that is. So I shredded about a quarter of the cucumber into some cheesecloth and squeezed out all of the liquid. There is A LOT of liquid in cucumber. I then mixed the cucumber juice with some of the plastic lime juice and some Hendrick's gin. I have no idea of the proportions.

I had tried to chop some ice using the Magic Bullet, but when it all game together, the ice had melted, but the drink was cold and frothy. I added the tonic water at the end, using Fear Tree tonic, which, if you haven't tried, you should. Then I put it over ice in a glass chosen to support tonight's hockey game. It ended cool, refreshing and delicious.

Oh, and don't worry about the cucumber that I grated, I tossed that in with the salad in the bag that was all I had the energy to make for dinner. Well, that's a lie, I also ate about a third of a rotisserie chicken. But then I saw Paula Deen make mashed potatoes and I didn't feel so bad about myself...

Stop 20: Wisconsin Brown Sugar, Cranberry, and Pecan Cake

2011-06-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

I did a Sarah-style triathalon today. This means I rode my biked 4 miles and walked 1 1/2 miles and came home and passed out on the couch. The passing out on the couch is the third activity in the tri. As I as passed out on the couch, I realized that I was going to a birthday party tonight and hadn't made a cake. Then I thought something along the lines of, "woe is me," (back of hand to forehead), "it is far too late now for me to make a cake that would be ready tonight. Alas..." Then I looked at the clock and realized it was only noon, got over myself and went to Whole Foods. I had to go to Whole Foods because for this recipe I needed muscovado sugar and maple sugar. Interestingly, in my house right now, I have muscovado sugar, turbinado sugar, maple sugar, and dark brown sugar. No white sugar.

Anyway, my friend whose birthday it is is from Wisconsin, so I decided to make the Wisconsin cake (seems logical, yes?). The Wisconsin cake is this brown sugar, cranberry, pecan thing. Brown decided on this cake because cranberries are the state fruit of Wisconsin and they celebrate them in a festival every September in a place called Warrens, Wisconsin. I have no idea if this is near where Molly is from, but it's okay. It turns out that Wisconsin produces the most cranberries of any state in the country. As a girl from Massachusetts, this hurt a little to discover.

Brown says he likes to pair dried cranberries with muscovado sugar, which he, of course, just has around the house. Muscovado sugar is a kind of unrefined brown sugar. It is also known as "Barbados sugar" or "moist sugar," though, that is from Wikipedia, so take it as you will. This recipe also called for maple sugar. Maple sugar is what is left at the end of the maple syrup-making process. It is also what we commonly leave out of the maple sugar sweet potatoes every Thanksgiving because it is really, really expensive. Well, now we have it. And at $10/lb, we'd darn well better use it every Thanksgiving from here on out.

The recipe is cooked in a bundt and calls for a rum-confectioners' sugar glaze. There is also rum in the cake. I used Captain Morgan's since I seem to have acquired a handle of it at some point and I don't drink it, so I will use it in recipes until it is gone. You cook the dried cranberries in the rum for a little bit, I assume to plump them up and get them good and tanked, then mix them in with the rest of the wet ingredients. Besides that, it's a pretty typical cake recipe. Cream the creaming ingredients (where the white sugar and muscovado sugar go) and add the wet and dry ingredients (where the maple sugar went) alternately. Then you bake it. I am being a bit anal about the oven this time since it did the whole turn itself off three times thing in the middle of baking the Coca-cola cake (stupid oven).

I also, and this part is embarrassing, but I'm putting it in anyway, left out the sour cream. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but when I had finished the dishes and the cake was well into the baking process, I looked on the counter and saw the sour cream sitting there, all un-opened and innocent looking. The cake came out fine, super rich and sweet and delicious. It was a bit crumbly and I have a feeling the sour cream would have helped with that. Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do with 10oz of full-fat sour cream.

All in all, it was definitely a success. I think it would be more of an autumn cake and it definitely had a coffee cake feel to it. I think it would be perfect for breakfast the day after Thanksgiving. If I had to choose between this one and the Delaware coffee cake, the Delaware cake would definitely win out, but this is a good one to have in the arsenal.

Here it is all naked and ready to be iced. I think the discoloration comes from the oil spray, but I'm not 100% sure.

There is a layer of thinner icing underneath the thicker top layer because I had the proportions off a bit when I started. I think it looked pretty nice by the time it was done.

And here's the birthday girl enjoying her half-eaten cake!

I have no next stop predictions right now. I guess it will have to be a surprise...

Short Trip to the New England of my Youth

2011-06-01T05:33:00.000-07:00

Hey New Englanders, remember these?

I've heard that they have ice cream cups in other parts of the country, called things like Dixie Cups, but none of them can be quite the same as a dual-flavor delicacy of the light, whipped Hood ice cream cup. I bought a package of Hoodsies the other day. They might not have come with the flat wooden spoon, and they sure seemed smaller than I remembered (could be that I've grown...), but the sentiment was the same and the flavor brought me back to hot summer days and sticky elbows. I gave one to the three year old niece and discovered that they have the same affect on kids now that they did when I was that age. Utter glee!

Then, of course, I made the mistake of checking the nutrition facts (NEVER, EVER check the nutrition facts on ice cream, just don't do it), and now, I can't eat them ever again. It is so much better to go to an ice cream parlor and be in the dark. But, last night, I did discover the best purpose for them ever: Ice Cream Sandwiches.

It started when I made the famously delicious Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies of Cooks Illustrated fame to bring tonight's potluck. When they came out of the oven, I was marveling at how perfectly round and equal in size they all were. It was also about 150 degrees in the kitchen and my thought went immediately to using them for ice cream sandwiches.

I pondered what kind of ice cream to get and how exactly to do this on my entire ride home from the Cape and realized about half way back that I had the answer already in my freezer, in the form of 3oz chocolate/vanilla swirl ice cream cups.

It was the perfect (though maybe not most cost-effective) solution, especially since I wasn't going to eat them as they were.

I simply ran a knife around the outside of the cup plopped the ice cream onto the bottom of one cookie. It was already in the right shape...

...and after a quick spread with the knife, was ready to be topped with the other cookie. Then back into the freezer they went to get nice and solid and ready to be eaten.

Honestly, what could be better than that?

Stop 19: Michigan Sauerkraut Cake

2011-05-31T05:47:00.000-07:00

Remember how in the last post I vowed I was going to make the Lane cake next? Well, it seems I lied. I made the chocolate sauerkraut cake instead. Oh yes, you heard me right, sauerkraut. In a cake. And you know what? It wasn't half bad...

A few weeks ago I did the first recipe from Michigan, the Rice Krispies treats. They were harmless and delicious. This weekend, I was on the Cape, enjoying Memorial Day Weekend in beach-style when we (my mother and I) were challenged to a Scrabble game. This is not an infrequent occasion with my mother and myself, nor the people who made the challenge. It did seem to call for something exotic though, and since one of our challengers hasn't seemed to be able to get enough of sauerkraut recently, I decided to whip this little doozy up. Of course, she hasn't been able to get enough of sauerkraut on hot dogs. And sandwiches. And other places where sauerkraut normally belongs. And isn't disgusting.

In the book, Brown said that when looking for cakes that represent Michigan, he, unsurprisingly, came across a lot of recipes with German and Polish roots. One that came up a lot was paczki, which is something like a doughnut. Since it wasn't really a cake (and he knew I would never be able to deep fry anything), he kept looking, and eventually came across this cake.

Brown's explanation for why sauerkraut makes sense in a cake is that it, "provides bulk in the batter and reacts with the baking soda to give more height to the cake. Once it's baked into the cake, the texture of sauerkraut mimics that of shredded coconut..." I found the first part of that reasoning to be untrue. though I did use a square pan that was larger than the round pan called for because we didn't have any round pans (what you'll find at the Cape house is always a bit of a mystery), and the second part to be completely true. Not only did it take on the consistency of coconut, but it even tasted like it once you convinced yourself that was what was in it.

Brown's recipe called for the chocolate whole egg buttercream, but I didn't have it in me to make a meringue and deal with a hot stove, so I made the same old fashioned chocolate buttercream as I used on the Coca-Cola cake. It never set up enough to make me happy, which probably had to do with the humidity (which was high).

As far as how it tasted went, well, it tasted good. I mean, for one thing, it was a cake filled with butter, eggs, sugar and sour cream, so really, how bad could it be. As for the sauerkraut itself, you certainly couldn't taste that it was pickled cabbage. There was no vinegar or cabbage flavor to it at all. The consistency was a but like stringy coconut, which I didn't love, but everyone who tried it thought it was outstanding. And the cake itself was dense and moist and everything a cake should be. We didn't tell anyone what the secret ingredient was and made them guess. One assumption was carrots, which I think was a good guess. The best part was that my nine-year-old nephew, who normally won't touch anything that isn't "normal," asked if there was really cabbage in it and when discovered that there was, continued to eat it and even allowed that he liked it. Though that might have had to do with the cake and it might just have had to do with him growing up. Either way, I'll take it...

Here are some pics of it all dressed up. There are still some pieces in the freezer if anyone wants to try it...

Next we're going off-book and taking a trip back in time to my New England youth...

Stop 18: Georgia Coca-Cola Cake

2011-05-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

Whenever I think of Georgia, I automatically think of the opening theme song to Designing Women. I believe that Designing Women might be one of the best sitcoms ever aired on television. I wept when Dixie Carter died and I once saw Annie Potts on Broadway. She was playing a Chinese woman and the whole thing was terribly inappropriate, but it satisfied a long-unknown dream of seeing one of the women from Designing Women in person. Magical, it was.

I digress. Whenever I think of Georgia, I automatically think of Designing Women first, and then of Coca-Cola second. Atlanta and Coke have been synonymous forever. Especially since the Braves got over being the best thing in baseball. It seems that Warren Brown also thought of Coca-Cola when thinking about Atlanta because that is the cake he allotted to Georgia. No peach pie, no sweet tea trifle, nope, just a good, old-fashion Coca-Cola Cake. And it turns out that the Coke cake is pretty old fashioned. People have been experimenting with with Coke in recipes, both sweet and savory, pretty much since the stuff was bottled and available in the home. Brown references a recipe to Coca-Cola chicken wings that I think sound delicious and might just have to try sometime (depending on how much frying is involved, me being me and all...).

The Coca-Cola cake was pretty standard, flour, butter, sugar, cocoa powder, etc. It also called for mini marshmallows, which meant it was hellish to tell when it was cooked through (though, this might also have had something to do with my oven shutting off three times during the baking process). (I hate my oven.) Instead of any sort of leavening powder or the whatnot, the recipe called for a cup of good, old fashioned Coca-Cola. That left me with 12 oz in the bottle, which I gave to a very confused co-worker on Monday morning.

As I mentioned above, the marshmallows and stupidity of the oven made it slightly difficult to tell when the cake was baked and I wasn't overwhelmed with the texture when it did come out. I can't blame the recipe as much as the circumstance in this area though. That being said, the icing was incredible. And this is from a girl who doesn't like icing. It was an Old-Fashioned Chocolate Buttercream and I swear, it was amazing. Or at least, the two bites I had were.

As for the reception. It went over quite well at the potluck. One dinner attendent said that she liked it and could really tast the Coke in it. The others then spent some time convincing her that she couldn't really taste the Coke in it at all, and then we progressed to a conversation about whether or not Victorian women talked about sex while needlepointing the day away. We left split on that.

Next Stop: Alabama Lane Cake. I want to make the Lane Cake before all the students are done reading To Kill a Mockingbird, since it's referenced in there. But, since the reference is to how much liquor is in it, I will not be bringing this one to work...

Stop 17: Hawaiian Coconut Cupcakes

2011-05-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

Of course Rice Krispies Treats weren't enough. I had to make cupcakes too! I've also been on a totally weird wanting coconut kick, so the fact that the Hawaiian recipe happened to be a coconut recipe, totally fit the bill.

Hawaii is actually far more known as a producer of macadamia nuts and pineapple in the commercial world, but coconut, being a fun baking ingredient, is where Brown opted to go.

The coconut flavor in these cupcakes is from coconut milk and coconut oil, the latter of which I had never even heard of before, let alone baked with. I called Whole Foods before I bothered getting on my bike to make sure they'd have it and they did. It's a weird oil because it's hard and not solid like shortening, but hard and you kind of have to chip it out of the jar. I needed a quarter-cup and used the water measuring technique my mom showed me years and years ago, filling a measuring cup with a half-cup of water and then adding the coconut oil until the water level reached 3/4 cup. It sure beats trying to shove greasy, hard oil into a measuring cup. Because the recipe called for the so the coconut oil, it called for very little butter (just about three tablespoons). This made me wonder about experimenting with recipes to make pareve (no dairy or meat) desserts more tasty.

The cupcakes baked very nicely. They were topped with an "Old-fashioned Tangy Buttercream," which uses a similar method as the old fashioned buttercream from the Red Velvet and Hartford Election cakes, but with buttermilk instead of regular milk. The icing didn't quite come together as well as I would have liked it to originally. I think the milk mixture was still too warm when I added it to the creamed butter-sugar mixture, so the butter melted a little, but it all firmed up in the fridge. I liked the icing, but I think I would go for something more tropical with these cupcakes in the future.

The cupcakes themselves were very good. Or so I've been told. My father said the cake was a bit dry, but the icing was good, but then he managed to eat the third cake I brought over (and decided not to eat because I'm me), meaning that he'd eaten two in a space of about 10 minutes. It seems that men never do outgrow that garbage disposal period they go through in high school. I have a bunch left for the pot luck. Maybe I'll try one then.

Next Stop: I'm not 100% sure, but I think I'm going to attempt the Smith Island Cake for the End of the World Party on Friday. We'll see!

Stop 16: Michigan Rice Krispies Treats

2011-05-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

As you can see, we've deviated a bit from the straight and narrow trip south that we were so pleasantly heading on before. Actually, what am I talking about? We went from New York to Vermont to Delaware to Kentucky before this. Never mind. As expensive as baking is, if this were a real trip, I'd be way out of money by now. Have you seen the price of gas recently?

Anyway, back to it. I think I have looked at the east coast/south recipes too often because the idea of making any of them this weekend was terribly unappealing. I wanted to make something to have when people came over on Saturday night (for the second week in a row-I'm a regular hostess-with-the-mostess!), and that would transfer well to the pot-luck on Tuesday, where, I hope they're okay with leftovers yet again.

Rice Krispies Treats were the perfect answer. For one thing, they're easy. For another, they're EASY. For a third, I am the one person you've probably ever heard of who has messed up Rice Krispies Treats in the past. Yeah, for some reason, they always seem to come out dry. Knowing me, I probably don't put in enough butter. I do like to make everything as low-fat as possible, but that seems like a bit much, even for me.

It turns out the reason we get to make Rice Krispies Treats in Michigan is because Mildred Day, an employee at the Kellogg Company (based in Battle Creek, Michigan), created them to sell at a fund-raiser for a Campfire Girls Group. They were first featured on a Rice Krispies box in 1941 and have been showing up ever since.

Because Brown likes to mix it up, he gave two alternative recipes to the traditional treat. One involved grinding dehydrated strawberries into a powder and mixing it in with the marshmallow and butter mixture. The other was adding a chocolate/cream mixture and adding that in. I thought the strawberry version sounded downright disgusting and as for the chocolate, I had a much better alternative.

I made the treats and they came out very well. Soft and chewy and just buttery enough. Perfect. I left half of them plain and put them aside. The other half I decided to dress up in my own special way. Along the lines of the paradise brownies from last week, first I smothered them in a peanut butter powdered sugar concoction and then I covered that in a dark chocolate ganache. I left everything set in between and they came out really well. Oh, I also dumped some leftover Reese's Pieces on top, because, well, come out. How could I not?

They really did come out gluttonously delicious.

I also made Coconut Cupcakes because I like to overdo it. Those are up next!

Stop 15: Massachusetts Boston Cream Pie (+)

2011-05-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

Remember last year this time? It was Mother's Day, which always falls on the same week as my grandmother, sister-in-law and mother's birthdays. So, every year, I make a cake. Now, if you knew my grandmother, you would know that she is 92 years old, quite smitten with her great grandchildren (to put it extremely mildly), and likes Boston Cream Pie. I know this last fact because every time we are anywhere where there is Boston Cream Pie, she tells me that it's her favorite dessert and I think that, damn it! when you're 92, you should get your favorite dessert on every birthday. I would give it to her every day, but she wouldn't eat it, she's convinced she has to watch her diet. When I'm 92, I'll be hitting the tanning beds and bourbon bottle more than just on Derby day, but to each their own.

OK, so I made the Boston Cream pie according to Brown's recipe, and to be honest, I didn't love it. I didn't actually eat the cake, and it seemed like it came out alright, but it took an awfully long time to cook. My issue was much more with the pastry cream. The recipe I used last year, was much easier, and came out much better. I also found the ganache from last year's recipe to come out a lot better as well. Anyway, the cake was a big success regardless of what I thought. I don't think I'll be recreating it, since I've had better success elsewhere, but everyone who actually ate it thought it was quite good. I just wish the pastry cream would have set better... Oh well.

Oh right, the detour in PARADISE!

Because of the aforementioned multitude of birthdays, it was requested that something chocolate and peanut butter be created for the occasion as well. I was a little pouty about it because I couldn't think of anything and had so much on my baking plate, but then I found these!

I decided to make them. And they, like the cake, did not come out physically as well as I would have liked, but they tasted like a slightly absurdly good version of awesome. I used brownies from a mix and they didn't cook evenly for some reason which meant that the ones in the middle had extra gooey bottoms (really not much of an issue). My peanut butter didn't firm up as much as I'd have liked, and the chocolate firmed up a bit too much, which made the cutting a little bit difficult. But hey, I'm a perfectionist.

Stop 14: Kentucky Derby Cake

2011-05-09T17:50:00.000-07:00

I know that at the end of the last post I said I would make the New Jersey ice box cake next, but I guess I lied. The Kentucky Derby came along and I just couldn't pass up the chance to make a cake called the Kentucky Derby Cake that was soaked in a bourbon sugar syrup. Who could pass that up? Of course, then I realized that I needed an occasion at which the cake would be eaten and since bringing a bourbon-soaked cake to a middle school seemed wrong, I threw an accidental party. It was accidental because more people said they'd attend than I expected. It was a party because we played Apples to Apples. And there was cake.

This cake was based on a traditional derby pie, which I guess is chock full of nuts, chocolate and fatty goodness. Brown took that recipe and translated into a "rich buttermilk cake glazed with chocolate and candied nuts that should keep us safely beyond the reach of the long arm of the law." The cake was pretty easy to make, though there were a few different steps to it that made it seem complicated. It has nuts in it as well as on it. The recipe starts by toasting the nuts to be baked into the cake (the cake has nuts and chocolate chips in it). Then you make the cake, which is a buttermilk-y, egg-filled bundt of goodness.

While it's baking (at Brown's ever-favorite 335 degrees), you make the candied nuts, which involves making sugar syrup. I should probably have made the sugar syrup earlier, but in true me-fashion, I don't read recipes in advance!! To make the nuts, you mix the walnuts (or pecans, your choice), sugar syrup, salt, turbinado sugar, and bourbon together and bake them for a while. While those are baking, you might as well go ahead and make the syrup you're going to drench the cake in. That calls for butter, sugar, water and more bourbon!

Brown didn't specify whether the syrup was supposed to be poured on the cake while it was hot or after it was cooled, so I did it when the cake had been out of the oven for a while, but was still a bit warm. Here is the biggest piece of advice I can offer you about this cake: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE THE CAKE AFTER SOAKING IT IN SYRUP. Yeah, I did that and I almost lost the entire thing. I managed to save it and luckily, there was a chocolate glaze to cover the cracks with. The chocolate glaze was the only thing involved in this cake that didn't have bourbon in it, by the way.

So, after all the steps and all the recipes and all the bourbon, the cake was beautiful. Eventually, the house was also clean and the people arrived (with food!), and the derby party, sans horses and races, started and was a marvelous success! The cake was quite tasty, incredibly rich and definitely vault-worthy.

Pictures!

Next Stop: Massachusetts Boston Cream Pie (with a stop in chocolate peanut butter paradise)!

Stop 13: Delaware Coffee Cake

2011-04-28T16:33:00.000-07:00

So, here's what happened: I was at work today reading up on CNN about the schedule of events for the royal wedding tomorrow (I'm a librarian, I have to know these things...) and I saw that there was a section called "gifts from the public." This immediately made some sort of snorting noise come out of my mouth followed by something along the lines of, "for serious?" I mean, come on now. Who is going to buy a gift for the royal couple? First of all, you're not going to get a thank you note. There is no way that Will and Kate are going to be hand-addressing envelopes on their honeymoon down under to say that, gosh darn it, they're awfully grateful for that blender you sent. Secondly, what could they possibly need? It's the ROYAL wedding. This isn't some posh to-do in Manhattan, this is it. There is nothing I could possibly send to the royal couple that they don't have. Nothing they would actually want at least. So, I started thinking. Maybe I should make them a cake. And who doesn't like a coffee cake? So off I went...

OK, in all seriousness, that's not what happened at all. Not the part about the website they have sent up for gifts from the public, that's real. They're requesting charitable donations. There's a website about it: http://www.royalweddingcharityfund.org/. I believe if you give enough, you may receive a rhinoceros in exchange. Just don't expect a thank you note. Oh, and did you know that Prince Harry's officially in charge of the gift table? I read that in People Magazine. He's getting off pretty easy with this whole donate on the web thing.

Anyway, what really happened was that the humidity broke and the promised thunder storms were a let down, so I decided to make a coffee cake. That's the whole story. The one about it being a gift for Wills and Kate was much better. I imagined they would have been so delighted and called me darling and talked about how pleased they were that I thought of them on their big day.

In the book, Brown talks about how coffee cakes are from way back in the beginning of America. Regardless of what country the original settlers were originally from, everyone always enjoyed having a bit of a snack with their coffee (except Wills and Kate, they'd probably prefer it with a spot of tea). Originally, coffee cakes were made from a yeast dough, but the cake recipe is more common and generally what is thought of as coffee cake now.

This recipe is made in a 9X13 pan and has sugar, cinnamon, cocoa powder, cloves and ginger in the filling. The filling calls for walnuts as well, but I didn't put them in. Why are there no nuts in your coffee cake, Miss Chessman? you ask. Well, Timmy, I'll tell you why... My dad doesn't do nuts. He's not epi-pen allergic, but they've never really agreed with him. For that reason, we didn't do a lot of nuts as a family when I was growing up. Because that's how I was raised, I find myself very put off by nuts cooked into things, especially baked goods. When a cookie or brownie recipe calls for them, I typically leave them out. This was the same situation; I hope Warren Brown will understand.

When baking, this cake smelled a bit like what I image heaven would smell like. I also imagine this is what Westminster Abbey will smell like tomorrow morning. Or at least, it should. I am also happy to report that it tastes incredible as well. Sweet, but not too sweet. And the middle is all full of gooey goodness where the brown sugar melted and the top is crisp and the cake is light and rich. This is definitely one to be repeated. Even if it's not for an occasion like the royal wedding.

Next Stop: New Jersey Old-Fashioned Ice Box Cake

Stop 12: Vermont Maple Creme Brulee

2011-04-26T11:48:00.000-07:00

For this next recipe, I had to backtrack a bit to Vermont. The creme brulee recipe was the second I read when I got the book and I was very excited to make it (mostly I was excited about using that little torch), but when I realized that it could be done as easily over Passover, a holiday not known for the delicacy of its desserts), I decided to put it off.

I made the creme brulee on the same day that I made the cheesecake. The reasons for this were two-fold. One being that if the cheesecake was going to be an utter disaster, at least I'd have something else to feed my mother's friends, and the other being that unless I was planning on throwing a dinner party anytime soon, I was going to end up with six ramekins of creme brulee, and really, who needs that with bathing suit season looming so near?

Making the recipe itself was pretty easy, much easier than I would have expected. It's mostly just eggs, some more eggs, some egg yolks, and then some heavy cream to even out the fat content. It also called for a vanilla bean, and some fancy pouring hot liquid while whisking, which caused me to bring in a sous chef, but once all that was finished, it just went into the oven and baked. And baked. And baked some more.

That was the weird part. Brown said that it should have baked for 40 minutes, or until it didn't jiggle anymore. Mine were in the oven for a good half hour longer than called for, and I still think they were too jiggly. Eventually, we pulled them out because, well, come on...

After they came out of the oven they were supposed to cool and then go into the fridge to set. I seemed to have a thing for 14-part recipes that day. So, I took my one brulee and left the rest (and some tubinado sugar) in the capable hands of my capable mother. She served them to her friends and they were met with grand success. I waited for mine to cool and then also coated it with the turbinado sugar and ate it. Ironically, I never actually got to use the little torch, I just stuck it under the broiler for a few minutes and it was crisp and crunchy.

Also ironically, I realized, after bite number two of my own personal mini creme brulee, that beyond anything else, creme brulee is a custard and I don't like custard. It was quite impressive and now most of it is in my fridge. Oh well, we'll never make a sweet-tooth out of me...

The flavor was quite nice and it was met with approval by all who tried. I can't say that I noticed the maple flavor though, so that was a bit disappointing...

lined up, just having come out of the oven

crispy turbinado sugar shell

The artsy shot

the beginning of the end for me...

Next Stop: Delaware Coffee Cake should be just the thing to cure me from the no-bread Passover blues!

Stop 11: New York Style Cheesecake

2011-04-25T18:58:00.000-07:00

As promised, I made the NY cheesecake during Passover. I figured that since the only thing I would need to change was the graham crackers for the crust, and cookies is one thing that Passover does OK, as long as you're down with macaroons, I could make it work.

I have to admit that while the flavor of this cheesecake was outstanding, the consistency was a bit of a failure. I can also admit that that is the case because I had some trouble following directions (old Sarah is raring her obstinant head). The main issue was that I had not read the recipe in advance and did not realize that Brown allots a full eight hours of cooling/chilling time beyond the two hours of baking/resting time. I was making the cake for a party my mother was having (better her friends eat the full fat than I), and started too late.

The recipe itself was a pretty straightforward cheesecake. Cream cheese, sour cream, eggs, cookie crust... I have made two cheesecake before this one and they both have come out just fine with a normal amount of time to sit and hang out in the oven and then chill in the fridge. For this one, Brown wanted it to bake for one hour, sit in the oven with the door open for another hour, then sit on the counter for four hours and then sit in the fridge for at least four more hours. The cake was going to take ten hours to bake and the party was about seven hours away.

I figured I would give up and just make something else for the party (not so much an easy feat on Passover), but after about an hour of sitting out in part three, it felt pretty cool to me, so I popped it in the fridge. I left at that point, but I told my mom to serve it if she thought it seemed to be set. She said she left it in for another 2-2 1/2 hours and that it seemed fine, but in honestly, it was pretty soupy in the middle. In the end, I don't think it was the lack of chilling that made it not set up properly, I think it probably didn't actually bake long enough since it was still pretty darn jiggly after the hour with the oven on. I was in such a rush that I didn't feel like giving it any more time though, and so I ended up suffering in the end.

As I mentioned above, the consistency was a bit of a fail, but the flavor was quite successful. The recipe called for the seeds of a vanilla bean (which I happened to have a jar of in my cupboard) and lemon zest. The combination was quite nice, and this from a girl who doesn't like lemon! Everyone at the party (and at work today) complimented the flavor.

Like the angel food cake, I will not be recreating this one. I think when it comes time to make a cheesecake again, I'll likely turn to the one I made for my brother's birthday last fall. It came out well and was much less time consuming.

I don't have great pictures, sorry...

Here is the cake before being baked.

And the kosher-for-Passover cookies I used in lieu of grahams. They tasted pretty much like sugar...

Oh, here's a fun fact from the cookbook: Did you know that the Graham Cracker was invented in 1829 by Sylvester Graham, a dietary reformer who believed that a high-fiber diet would curb sexual desire? Explains why there were never any romantic dramas at that kindergarten I used to work at. I wonder if we can reinstate snack time in middle school...

Next Stop: Vermont Maple Creme Brulee

The Chocolate Class

2011-04-18T05:09:00.000-07:00

At the end of last year there was a Groupon for a chocolate class at Chocolee Chocolates in Boston's South End. My mother purchased two of these Groupons for my brother Dave, who lives in NYC, and is our family's resident chocolatier, and myself. Four months later, we finally found a time that worked for both of us when there was also space available in the class.

Chocolee Chocolates is run by Lee, a pastry chef who has been working in the industry for thirty years. Her shop is at 23 Dartmouth Street in the South End and the class was held in the connected kitchen (and actually community soup kitchen) just behind. Working in a more professional kitchen definitely reminded me of why I need a bigger one. By the way, here is what it looks like in my closet-kitchen after I wash dishes:

I could use a little more space...

I digress...

The classes are held on Saturdays from 10am-1pm. We took the green line in and walked through a windstorm to get there, which meant we were late by about 10 minutes, but very ready for chocolate.

The class was a lot of fun. It seemed intimidating at first because there was no "getting to know you" of the other students and as a teacher, I am used to that kind of thing, but it quickly broke down into friendly conversation once the knives started flying and chocolate started rolling. There were eight students all together.

Lee started by giving us an overview and then broke the kitchen down into stations. There was chocolate-chopping (which is why I now have ENORMOUS muscles), ganache-making, chocolate melting, and ganache rolling for free-form truffles (out of this amazing earl grey ganache that had been made previously).

Every time a new task was introduced, Lee would stop us from what we were doing and have us gather around to see it. Then we'd go back to work or take over the new task. Eventually, the free-form truffles needed to be coated and decorated and the filled candy trays needed to be prepped. Then we each got to make a tray of filled candies, using either milk or dark chocolate for the shell, and filling them with dark chocolate, cardamon, or hazelnut (which we made in class) ganache. Then we waited for them to set and got to slam them against a table. I learned that there is a lot of slamming of trays in chocolate-making. On the first day of vacation from running a middle school library, AND having frozen to death the night before just to see the Sox go from 3 and 9 to 3 and 10, it was just what I needed.

In the end we each took home a box of free-form truffles, filled candies from eight trays, and a bag of almond bark. It was a lot of chocolate. Which we are slowly chipping away at.

Meanwhile, in the midst of our learning/cooking, Lee and her assistant were also pulling amazing-looking pastries out of the oven. If you're ever in the neighborhood, I recommend popping your head into her tiny storefront. It's worth it for the smells alone. And if you have the opportunity to take the class, I'd recommend that as well; it was a welcome way to spend a chilly Saturday morning.

Free-form truffles and the first batch of filled candies

What the box looked like by the end of the class.

This was the tray I did, I used the transfers, which was a sheet of plastic with the little hearts on them, and a magnetic tray. It was a very interesting process.

This is how you get the filled candies (and your agression) out of the molds.

action shot

The trays these were filled in were dusted with edible dust prior to filling. That's what makes them sparkly and purple.

What was left of the enormous block of dark chocolate we started with.

Lee, me and Dave.

Stop 10: Pennsylvania Chocolate Chiffon Angel Food Cake

2011-04-14T10:50:00.000-07:00

The second recipe from Pennsylvania was a chocolate chiffon angel food cake. I decided to hold off on making it right after the traditional angel food cake, partially because of the horrible outcome of the original cake, and partially because I was at my parents' and my candy thermometer was at my house. I had learned my lesson about winging it, it was time to go all out and follow directions. Of course, about half way home, I realized that the reason I had gone to my parents' house to make the cake in the first place was because I didn't have a bundt pan. I am happy to announce that I am now the proud owner of a 12 cup bundt pan, purchased for $6.99 at the Star Market near my house (at which I had to stop anyway because I'd forgotten the cream for the recipe).

Moving on...

I was well into the cooking process when I read Brown's notes on the recipe (I have got to start doing that earlier!) and saw that he said that he has wanted to share this recipe for a while, but hadn't because of how complicated it was. This, of course, made me balk, but I stuck with it.

You might be asking yourself why this is called a chiffon angel food cake. I think Brown kind of made up that description on his own, but basically, it's an angel food cake because it has whipped egg whites, and it's a chiffon cake because it doesn't have butter. In this case though, rather than replacing the butter with oil, like you would in a normal chiffon cake, you replace it with cream. This doesn't exactly strike me as having the same results, but it seemed to work.

Making the cake started the same way as making the angel cake, by creating a meringue. This time I boiled the sugar syrup until it was definitely at temperature and it went into the egg whites a lot more easily. I also let the egg whites beat for far longer to after adding the syrup to let it incorporate than I had the other time. It worked a lot better this time.

After that, you remove the meringue from the mixing bowl (put it into another bowl), then you mix the wet ingredients (including TWO cups of heavy cream and FOUR egg yolks!!) together and add the dry ingredients to that. Then you mix in a third of the meringue. After that you fold in the rest and put it in the oven to bake and it comes out looking like this:

a.k.a. AWESOME.

Then, after a little bit you flip it out of the pan and it comes out like this:

Again, AWESOME.

After this, we reach one of those magical moments where I get mad at Warren Brown for a lacking of detail. He says that once the cake is cool and the sugar syrup you've made is cool, you should soak the cake in as much sugar syrup as you'd like. I don't know how to soak cake. I don't know how much is too much. I was confused, but I gave it a shot. This is what it looked like (the yellow stuff in the middle was a pool of sugar syrup):

Eventually, I let the cake soak overnight, flipping it once so the pool of syrup would end up at the top and not just be pooled at the bottom.

I was taking it to a potluck (more about that below) and thought that it needed a little something special, so I dusted the top with a cocoa powder-powdered sugar mix and then drizzled some chocolate icing that I had leftover from another cake. Unfortunately, the powder mixture all dissolved in by the time I arrived at the dinner, but I can't imagine it made it taste worse :-)

About the aforementioned potluck... I have new friends! And they have a dinner potluck every week and if I bring a cake, they'll give me dinner! For me, it's a very good deal, since I am a savory, far more than a sweet, and have this affinity for baking. I need a new outlet for cake-sharing anyway since being the only person to bring in sweets to work feels a bit thankless.

They all liked it and said very nice things. One dinner attendant commented that it was, "Mmmm, good." I thought it was a little dry. But then, I don't like cake.

Next Stop: The next two stops we're making will be in Vermont for Maple Creme Brulee, and New York for cheesecake. They'll definitely be made within the next week and a half since they're the only two I can make Passover-friendly and Passover starts on Monday!

I'm also taking a chocolate truffle making class with my brother on Saturday morning. I'm sure I'll have lots to say about that!

Stop 9: Pennsylvania Angel Food Cake

2011-04-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

Fun fact: Nobody knows where the angel food cake originated, but the large number of high-sided tube pans found in southeastern Pennsylvania in the 1800s has led historians to believe that the Pennsylvania Dutch developed what we now consider to be the angel food cake.

Fun fact #2: The Pennsylvania Dutch weren't actually Dutch. They were German. But when they said they were Deutsch, the meathead English misinterpreted what they said as Dutch, so they're now known as the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Moving on...

Since the cake for Pennsylvania is the angel food cake, I had to face a fact of my life that I don't like to admit too often. I am afraid of meringue. Honestly, the stuff scares the crap out of me and the idea of cooking with them in any form that isn't "whip, add sugar, put on baking sheet, bake" is kind of intimidating.

So here's the deal. I made the angel food cake. I used Brown's funky recipe that involved basically making an Italian meringue (pouring boiling hot sugar syrup into whipped eggs). I guess this way the egg whites don't overexpand while baking and it maintains the cloud-like texture. I followed all the directions to the best of my ability and I made the cake....

Here are my recommendations for making an angel food cake from scratch:

1. Don't make it from scratch, buy a box, add the water and eggs and go with it.

2. If it says to boil the sugar syrup to 245 degrees, actually boil the sugar syrup to 245 degrees. Don't just pretend you can tell how hot sugar syrup is without a candy thermometer. You can't.

3. Continue whipping the egg whites on high speed for quite a while after you add the sugar syrup to make sure they get and stay all fluffy.

If you follow these three suggestions, your cake will not come out like my cake, which was approximately 2" tall.

Here are some pictures of my sad, sad angel food cake.

I decided that because of the disastrous outcome of the angel food cake, combined with the fact that I had to use six eggs to make it, and the fact that I was going to make another version of an angel food cake right away, AND that I don't even like angel food cake - I decided not to make another one. I brought the weird one to work and it was eaten kind of like cotton candy.

Next Stop: We're staying in Pennsylvania with one of Brown's own recipes. A spin on angel food cake: Chocolate Chiffon Angel Food Cake.

Stop 8: Arkansas Dirt Cake

2011-04-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

I am not from the south and have not spent a lot of time in the south. Therefore, my knowledge of most southern recipes comes from Paula Deen. Because of this, I assume all southern recipes have a lot of butter in them. In this case, I was right.

In the book, Warren Brown says that this is a recipe that is normally made from Oreo cookies and instant pudding. But, he says, this is as easy, and totally worth it, to make it all from scratch. That last part is a lie.

Here's what the recipe calls for: a bunch of cookies all ground up to look like dirt (get it?), some cream cheese, some butter, some powdered sugar, oh, AND some pastry cream (yes, like the stuff that's in cream puffs), AND an entire recipe of whole-egg buttercream. In other words, this recipe is hell.

Let me just start with some numbers for you. To make this dirt pie, I used 5 1/2 sticks of butter and 11 eggs. That's like $27 right there, without adding in the sugar and flour and sugar and cocoa powder and the rest of the sugar. Instant pudding and Oreos - together that's like $4.49, right?

Anyway, I started by making the pastry cream since I knew it was going to need to set. Pastry cream is a pain to make, but I'm sure I'll go into more detail when I make the Boston Cream Pie (coming up in May). Next I made the chocolate cookies. These cookies were amazing. Super easy to make and really tasty. Too bad I had to grind em all up until they had the consistency of DIRT. Then I go to make the whole-egg buttercream. Brown has a way of tricking you into doing things that are way above your skill level. Its like he doesn't let on that it's a difficult recipe until you have a handful of egg yolks in one hand and a pot of boiling sugar syrup on the stove. And at that point it's too late. My favorite part of this recipe was this, "Meanwhile, whip the egg whites on high speed to stiff peaks in the bowl of a standing mixer fitted with the wire whip attachment. Time everything so that the sugar syrup reaches 250F at about the same time the egg whites form stiff peaks." Was he kidding? How am I supposed to know how long it's going to take for sugar syrup to reach 250 degrees? Or for egg whites to whip up for that matter. This recipe made me a little mad (in case you couldn't tell).

So, once I had everything done and had been cooking for 17 hours and needed a nap, that's when I got to start assembling the actual cake.

my beautiful cookies that were about to become dirt

Pastry cream. It didn't really set right, but I figured it would be ok since it was going into another recipe.

Full-recipe of whole-egg buttercream.

So, the pastry cream, buttercream, cream cheese, butter and powdered sugar got mixed together and made the filling. I ended up using my trifle dish because I seem to have misplaced (read broken) all of my pie dishes, which is what was called for, and because I'd never used it before, so why not?

I layered the cookies and filling and took it off to it's party to be the centerpiece and be appropriately appreciated...

("artistic" mirror shot)

Which is was!

Matt, the birthday boy, with his dirt.

Dirt on fire...

mmm, yummy dirt

By the way, I am well aware of the fact that Arkansas has no geographic proximity to NewYork. That's not my fault. Matt chose this cake from a variety of options he was presented with. We will be getting back on track immediately.

Next Stop: New York Cheesecake! I just need to find an occasion for which to make it now. This is getting expensive!

Stop 7: New York Red Velvet Cake

2011-04-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

Red Velvet Cake is one of the desserts Warren Brown designates as being from New York (the other is cheesecake). I was surprised to read this since I always associated red velvet with the south. In his explanation, Brown says that there is a well-known debate whether the cake originated in the 1920's in NYC or before that in the South. Brown gives it to NYC because of a story in which a woman had to pay $100 to get the recipe from the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and was so outraged over it that she then spread around the recipe to as many people as possible - for free.

I was also under the impression that I didn't like red velvet cake. I think what I've discovered is that I didn't like other people's red velvet cake. I LIKE this red velvet cake.

A few things to mention before we get to the pictures.

1. This cake recipe has surprisingly little chocolate in it. With only two tablespoons of cocoa powder in the whole batter, it's a very small percentage. That being said, I am surprised by how much the flavor comes through. There's a hint of chocolate that almost makes you do a double take to try to figure out what the surprise flavor is.

2. Brown says that in most of his recipes he likes to keep things as natural as possible, but in this one, there is simply no substitute for artificial food dye. He says he's tried all the natural dyes he could find, but that none of them do the job, and just to leave it out if you care less about color than chemicals. I will say that using that Wilton's food color sure did the trick. Check out the color of the batter and the baked cake below.

3. This cake was made with the same old-fashioned milk buttercream that went on the election cakes in Connecticut. Brown says that while cream cheese frosting is the icing commonly associated with red velvet cake, this is more likely what they used back in the day. Again, the icing whipped up well and came together nicely. I even piped with it this time and it was lovely.

4. Speaking of piping, I think I am finally learning that less is more when it comes to cakes. The pictures below, with just a few red M&Ms as decoration, were round two of decorating. The first try involved scrolls on the bottom and florettes on the top. It was just too much. The icing lays so smoothly that it seemed like a waste not to take advantage of it and the embellishment seemed over-the-top.

5. In the book, Brown shows pictures of red velvet cupcakes. I decided to do a cake because, well, quite honestly, I made cupcakes last and wanted to do something different. This cake is being brought to work and given to a colleague who has been having a rough time of it and just completed a daunting task. I hope she'll at least share a piece or two.

Pictures, pictures, pictures!

This is the batter after half an ounce of wilton Spiderman Red and half a tube of Easter egg dye.

See, less is more.

This is my artistic shot. Insert oohs and ahhs here.

It was cut at work and met with great satisfaction. Here are what the pieces looked like.

Next Stop: We are jumping to Arkansas for a homemade dirt cake. This was as per the request of a birthday boy. From the recipe, this cake's going to be a real pain in the butt, but I'm sure it'll be worth it.

Stop 6: Connecticut Nutmeg Spice Cupcakes

2011-03-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

So it turns out that people from Connecticut refer to themselves as "Nutmeggers." That is at least, according to Warren Brown in the Connecticut part of the book. Personally, I find this to be highly suspect and request anybody who is reading this who might be from Connecticut to please comment and tell me if it's true.

Brown states in the cookbook that while Connecticut is more commonly known as the Constitution State, it is also known as the Nutmeg State and that people down there really like their nutmeg. They like it so much that they used to put an entire nutmeg into their traditional Election Cake recipe. I guess the original recipe was a dense coffee-cake filled with dried fruits and, well, a whole nutmeg. They used to make it around elections. Maybe to have something substantial, but easy to eat while counting ballots late into the night? Brown based the recipe he put in the book on the book American Cookery by Amelia Simmons which was published in 1796. He altered it so that it wouldn't make enough to feed an entire church congregation and omitted the dried fruit to lighten the batter a bit.

For amusement, Brown left in one of the traditional recipes for election cake that he found. He didn't state where he got it, but it's worth repeating here:

Ingredients:
4 cups sugar
6 1/2 cups flour
4 eggs
1 pound each raisins, currants, 1/2 citron
1 teaspoonful salt
1 teaspoonful soda
Half yeast cake
2 gills Brandy
1 Nutmeg
2 cups Milk

I have no idea what a gill is, or where you would get a cake of yeast, but the real fun comes in the directions to put the cake together:

Make a sponge of the milk, add 4 cups of flour at 4 o'clock, at nine mix altogether, except the eggs, and Soda, that are put in, in morning. Then put in pans let stand 20 minutes and bake.

Brown points out that people must have spent a lot more time in the kitchen to know how to interpret such a skeletal set of instructions. He didn't say whether this was a recipe from a book or something passed down in a family or among friends, which also might make a difference. Either way, it seems recipe-writing has come a long way.

Old-timey amusement aside, Brown's updated recipe also had it's amusing quirks. For example, you mix all the wet ingredients together (without beating the eggs) by putting them together in a container with a tight-fitting lid and shaking for about 15 seconds. It worked really well. He should really rename this recipe the 15-Second Cupcakes because first you mix the dry ingredients for 15 seconds, then shake the wet for 15 seconds and finish it all by adding the wet to the dry and whisking them together for, you guessed it, 15 seconds!

The icing was also something I had never heard of before called an Old-fashioned Milk Buttercream. To make it you make a slurry of flour and milk (this took two tries) and heat it to thicken. Then, when it's cooled, you add it to creamed butter, sugar and vanilla. It makes quite a tasty, light, whipped topping. I spread it on the cooled cupcakes and then sprinkled them with a little freshly grated nutmeg for aesthetics.

Side Trip: Sweden

2011-03-24T06:11:00.000-07:00

So, I went to Sweden last night. I mean, I went to Ikea last night. Sometimes I get confused because of all the funny product names and that Dragon Tattoo girl buying Ikea furniture that they actually assembled for her (which was good because she was very tiny and not so stable). Anyway, I went to Ikea to return a lamp that didn't match the lamp in my house at all (I am super perceptive) and then I had to buy a small jar to store tea in, so I figured I'd do that while I was there. Unfortunately, I didn't really make it to the small jar section because I stopped in their little grocery store department and became intrigued by trying to figure out what Swedish words on packages of unfamiliar products meant. Most people wouldn't have bought anything, what with the not knowing what the words meant, but I decided it would be an adventure. (You can go ahead and read that as I have no idea what I bought.)

One thing I am pretty sure I purchased was the dill mustard sauce they use in their restaurant (I was tipped off because it said that in English on the sign), and I bought some smoked salmon (I recognized that because a good Jewish girl recognized lox like it's air). I also bought this rye bread that you just add water to, shake, pour, rise, bake and it becomes bread. Supposedly. Anyway, I got it into my head that I was going to make a potato salad with red potatoes, the dill mustard sauce, the smoked salmon, the random Swedish cheese I bought and the leftover watercress from my trip to England. So I did.

This is a bad picture of a mystery cheese. I am also now obsessed with this mystery cheese. It's delicious.
According to Wikipedia, this cheese is actually called Prastost and it is usually cured in whiskey. I am not sure if the one I bought was cured in whiskey, but it would explain a lot about last night. It also translates into Priest cheese, which is a conversation topic on its own. I did not put this in the potato salad

sauce with mustard and dill (look at me, I can read Swedish!!!)

These things are incredible. I am inclined to say that the Swedish word for fried might be the same as their word for roasted because there is no way these things have not seen a deep fryer. That being said, they're DELICIOUS. I put them in the potato salad too.

The potato salad! It has the lox, potatoes, watercress and onions in it, and is tossed
with the mustard dill sauce. Super Yummy!

Now, as for the bread in a carton, that's a different story.

Here it is. Bread mix in a carton that says all you need to do is shake and it will become bread.

That's actually what it says here, but my camera doesn't like to photograph words.

It said to shake first to loosen the flour from the bottom of the container, and I swear I did, but it still came out all lumpy, so I had to mix it with a spatula in the loaf pan.
At this point I should point out that it smelled like dog food.

and looked, sorry to be vulgar, but kind of like puke. I let it rise and then baked it. The house smelled funny.

It came out of the oven and was very heavy. I left it in the pan overnight because at this point I was kind of afraid of it.

Then I cut it. It smelled and looked better at this point (I'm not going as far as to say good here, notice that), but it didn't taste good. Not really even good for bread that you mix in a milk carton and buy at Ikea. How disappointing.

So, moral of the story: when the carton says you can just add water and shake and have bread miraculously appear that you'd actually want to eat, it might be best to go with your gut and assume that things that sound too good to be true normally are, too good to be true...

OK, no more side trips. I promise. Tomorrow we head to Connecticut for some new-age Hartford Election Cake!

Side Trip: English Tea

2011-03-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

I made a side trip to England this weekend to visit the Queen and take tea with some friends. Unfortunately, the Queen was not available (wedding plans and all), but the tea was lovely.

Actually, a friend and I decided that since March is such a long and painful month for anyone who works in a school, that we would break it up a little by having a ladies' tea to celebrate the first day of spring. It ended up being a beautiful, but cold, day with lots of sunshine. That, combined with some yummy treats and good friends, was the perfect cure to the March muddiness.

On the Menu:

Currant Scones & Strawberry Scones

with Devonshire cream, clotted cream, jam, honey and fresh whipped cream

Smoked Salmon Sandwiches & Cucumber and Watercress Sandwiches

with dill cream cheese and capers & butter (respectively)

Spiced Chocolate Mousse-stuffed Brownies

Victoria Sponge Cake

Irish Breakfast Tea

Hibiscus Herbal Tea

I made the scones and the brownies. The strawberry scones were from a recipe I used to make a lot which I like a lot because they have very little butter and call for non-fat yogurt. I actually used non-fat honey Greek yogurt for half of it and they came out very well. The currant scones were from a Martha Stewart recipe. They were NOT low-fat. They came together easily enough, but the dough was very dry and subsequently, the scones got hard. We solved that problem by putting them back in the oven about 20 minutes before the tea was due to start, which also made the house smell amazing.

The brownies were a bit more of a potschke. I made the mousse the night before and was never fully satisfied with how it set. The brownies were from a no-pudge mix (why not start with something better for you?) which meant that they were very fudgy and therefore very sticky. I eventually got them together though and dusted the tops and bottoms with a mixture of cocoa powder and powdered sugar so
they wouldn't stick to finger as much. Regardless of how they looked, they were very decadent.

I also made some mini Lime Earl Grey Tea Cakes for people to take home as little goody bags. I used the same recipe that I tried out a few weeks ago, but in smaller form. Then I topped each one with a caramel-filled chocolate wedge and put them in little bags tied with a red ribbon. They came out very well, with a light, but delicious flavor.

The tea itself pretty much caused me apoplexy in the store because there were too many options and I couldn't smell them. Without smelling them I had no idea what more smokey vs. less smokey vs. more rich vs. less rich flavor really meant. I should take a tea tasting class the way other people take wine tasting classes.

The event was lovely. We decorated with gorgeous flowers, and had a wonderful time.

Victoria Sponge Cake (SO yummy)

homemade lemon curd, brought by a guest

tea sandwiches

Now, one quick stop in Sweden and I promise, I'm heading back on the road to Connecticut!

Side Trip: Restaurant week dinner at Rialto

2011-03-22T05:46:00.000-07:00

For restaurant week last Thursday, I was offered the chance as fill-in wife for my friend whose wife was out of town to complete a reservation for four at Rialto in the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square. I took it.

I had never been to Rialto before, and after seeing their normal menu prices, and normal prix fixe menu price of $70/pp, I understood why. It was the perfect place at which to take advantage of the $33.11 restaurant week menu.

I started with the Early spring minestrone… pesto, beans, toasted pine nuts. It was light and hot and delicious. Just what I needed for the sore-throat-that-just-won't-end. The other options that were had at my table were Mozzarella… artichokes, tomatoes, anchovies, mint (sans the anchovies) and Quercia cured ham… asparagus, salsa verde, aged goat cheese. Everybody raved.

The main course options were Floppy tomato lasagna… farro pasta, ricotta, basil, Char… avocado, quinoa, crème fraiche (which I had), Smoked and roasted chicken… chorizo, chick peas, peppers, and Roast lamb leg… potatoes, peas, pancetta, grains of paradise. Two people at the table got the lamb, and one shared, so I got a bite or two. I thought it was outstanding and the original reason I hadn't gotten it was because I don't normally like lamb. I'm beginning to realize that maybe I do like lamb if it's prepared the right way. I though the char was prepared well, but the fish itself didn't have a ton of a flavor. I originally avoided the lasagna, because who wants to get lasagna at restaurant week?, but after seeing the recipe (it's one of the ones they post on their website), I kind of regret it. It sounds very interesting. One person in my party also had the chicken and was quite pleased.

Dessert options were a Chocolate torta with espresso custard filled bombolini, Pineapple coconut sorbet, toasted coconut, chocolate mint sauce, and Caramel macadamia cornmeal crust tart with banana rum sauce. I was afraid that the chocolate would be too rich and a macadamia tart did nothing for me. I got the sorbet, which was just what I needed because it was delicious, but not overly filling. And it came with this cookie that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I ate it. It was like being in the tropics with every bite. (I asked for the recipe and respectfully told they weren't giving it out at this time, but I'm going to keep at it.)

All in all, I was very impressed; I found the food to be incredible and service to be delightful. If anybody has a rich uncle coming in from out of town, this is definitely a place worthwhile of letting him take you.

Since eating there, I have also become slightly obsessed with their website on which they offer a variety of recipes which I will get around to trying just as soon as I finish this road trip (so in 2013 maybe). I also saw that they offer cooking classes with the chef, which I think would be something definitely worth doing. Anyone want to come along? Unfortunately, the next one is 4/16 and I'm already taking a class that day - in chocolate making :-)

Stop 5b: Massachusetts Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake - Take 2

2011-03-13T12:26:00.000-07:00

It seems that regardless of how old and practiced you get at something, sometimes you just need your mother to make it come out right.

I went to my parents' house to bake the chocolate chip cookie cake again. I did this for two reasons. The first being that they have a better oven than I do (it stays on by itself and you can set a specific temperature as opposed to mine which shuts off whenever it wants and you kind of have to guess between 300 and 350), and second that I wanted another set of eyes on the recipe. They also have a kitchen scale and since ingredients are given mostly in weight measurements with a cup measure as a secondary, I was able to measure more precisely.

I don't know if it was one of those things that was the difference between yesterday and today, or if I left something out accidentally yesterday, but the cakes today came out perfectly. The batter was much wetter and more smooth and spread while baking like it was supposed to. The result was cookies that looked like cakes rather than cookies that looked really big and are hard to cut. With the remainder of the icing that finally set enough over night, the cake came together perfectly.

So, in the end, the chocolate chip cookie cake came out spectacularly.

I offer big thanks to my mother and her kitchen.

Now, what to do with the enormous hard cookies that are in pieces all over my counter top - I guess the coworkers are getting an extra treat tomorrow!

As for the road trip. Vermont is being skipped at the moment because it is the only Passover-friendly recipe in the book, so I figure I might as well wait it out. And the Boston Creme Pie will be done in May for my grandmother's birthday, since BCP is her favorite.

Next stop: Connecticut Hartford Election Cake (Nutmeg spice cupcakes)

Stop 5. Massachusetts Chocolate Chip Cookie Cake - the first disaster?

2011-03-13T11:38:00.000-07:00

While Massachusetts is typically known for desserts involving cranberries and Boston Creme Pie, Brown decided to honor the home of the original chocolate chip cookie by making it into a cake. The story of the chocolate chip cookie is that back in the day, Ruth Wakefield, proprietress of the Toll House Bed and Breakfast in Whitman, Mass., ran out of Baker's chocolate when preparing dessert for her guests and substituted it with chunks of semisweet chocolate, I assume thinking they would melt into the cookies. When they were baked, they hadn't melted completely, but maintained their chocolate blob shape in the cookie. Boom, chocolate chip cookies were born and the world would never be the same.

So, Brown devised a recipe that makes two large cake-like cookies and fills them with chocolate icing. Nothing wrong with that at all.

This stop on the trip was a bit of an extra adventure for me because I've been sick all week with a combination of tuberculosis, pneumonia, the black plague, and whooping cough (I am very rational when I get sick; I get it from my dad), so this is the first thing I've done that has actually involved my getting off the couch (I walked all the way to the grocery store! All 30 feet!). It also was an experience in hand-washing. My hands are VERY clean. And VERY dry...

To begin I am going to say that my cookie cakes do not look like Warren Brown's cookie cakes. His look like cakes, with chocolate chips in them. Mine look like really big cookies. I'm not complaining; who would complain about really big cookies?

So, to start I made the batter, which was a pretty basic chocolate chip cookie recipe, though with very little liquid. The batter came up very crumbly, which I guess was expected. Before folding the chocolate chips into the batter, I was supposed to toss them in two tablespoons of the liquid mixture and then 1/4 cup of the dry mixture. I assume this was to coat the chips to keep them from sinking, or melting too much, or really I have no idea what the purpose was, but I did it. This recipe also called for shortening, which I hardly ever use because of my love for my arteries, but I'm trying to learn how to follow directions. I imagine the shortening helps the cookie keep its shape rather than all butter which would spread too fast and cook too quickly. Again, I'm making things up here.

The icing is also much more like a ganache than I expected. Cream and sugar are brought to a simmer and then poured over bittersweet chocolate, butter and vanilla. Then you whisk it until smooth and wait for it to thicken. From the picture in the book, I was expecting something a lot lighter. Regardless, chocolate, cream and butter, again - who's complaining? Brown also said to set it aside until it thickens, but he didn't say how long it would take. I literally had to leave it all day until it got thick enough to even spread and mildly stay in place and it wasn't until I put it in the fridge that it really solidified (the recipe said specifically not to put it in the refrigerator, I was packing the leftovers away.) After a night in the fridge it definitely has the right consistency and tastes good.

Unfortunately, my cakes really just came out like really big cookies (as I mentioned above), which is fine, but they don't have the least bit of a cake-like consistency and are really hard to cut. They didn't spread as much as they should and I had to cook them for much longer than it said. Maybe I should have pulled them out after 24 minutes, but they were barely cooked...

What mine looked like.

What it looked like in the picture in the book.

I think this is going down as the first mishap on the road trip. I will try it again and see what different results I get.

Side Trip: Restaurant week dinner at Meritage

2011-03-11T05:50:00.000-08:00

I've decided to do a short post about my restaurant week dinner at Meritage after all. For non-locals, Meritage is a fancy schmancy restaurant in the Boston Harbor Hotel, which is one of the ritzier hotels on the Boston waterfront. The location earns a super A+, as does the hotel providing free valet to restaurant guests, which kept me from having to T it in my delicate and plague-stricken state.

We showed up just about on time, I drove right by the valet entrance, pulled over by a couple of fire hydrants and tracked down the valet attendant. He didn't seem super thrilled, but he took my key. It was very Boston (A+ for valet guy). I couldn't find the restaurant at first because it is discreetly located at the back of the hotel and up a flight of stairs. The only distinguishing identifiers being a small brass sign next to the stair case (A+ for concierge who not only told me where the restaurant was, but walked me there - I was wearing my cute coat though...).

I checked the aforementioned cute coat and the poor coat check girl didn't get a tip because I couldn't figure out where to put it. I've never been very good at tipping non-waitstaff. The whole concept confuses me and I'm always convinced I'm doing it wrong, which I suppose is better than not doing it at all... Oh well.

We were seated at a four-top with three place settings right next to the bar on the opposite side of the restaurant from the windows. Now, I understand that not everyone can have a table with a view, but I have to admit that I was disappointed. It was pretty much like being at any other restaurant, and being next to the bar meant much more noticeable waitstaff as well. Speaking of the waitstaff, the guy was good, but not really around. He came by and told us about the special menu and wine flight and then disappeared for a noticeable amount of time. We all knew what we wanted before we even got there, so that was a bit annoying.

We all ordered the lobster tail appetizer, short ribs main course and then the two of them got the chocolate tasting plate dessert and I got the cheese plate. Yes, the girl who likes the bake opted for the cheese plate. I'm one of those...

Everything was fine, tasty even, though I wasn't blown away. They offered three little bread selections, which were good, and the butter was softened perfectly (these are things I notice). I am a recent lobster-convert, so I don't have much to compare it to, but it was very good. The best of the three courses I'd say. The short ribs were prepared and presented well, but I found the sauce to be a little unflavorful and over-salted. I was also stricken with the black plague at the point of ingestion though, so might not have had the full use of all of my taste buds. The cheese plate hit the spot, though the little salad that accompanied it seemed unnecessary, and the tastes of the chocolate taster that I sneaked were quite tasty.

What I notices the most though, beside the food and the large party of girls seated next to us, was the awkwardness of the waitstaff. They kept coming by to give us new silverware for each course, but because of the way the table was situated (two on the booth, one in a chair across), there was a lot of reaching. Now, I don't eat fancy a lot, and I was certainly not raised going to places like this, but there's something to be said for serving from the left and collecting from the right. It wasn't completely possible because of the situation of the table. I just felt like I saw more hands than I needed to that night.

All in all, it was good. The food was good and company lovely. I doubt I'll ever return of my own fruition, but I wouldn't pass up a chance to accompany someone there, especially to a window table and non-restaurant week menu. I would, though, love to go back to the hotel in better weather and take advantage of the beautiful views.

I didn't take any pictures of the food because it just seemed tacky :-)

Stop 4. Louisiana King Cake

2011-03-08T04:32:00.000-08:00

I decided to take a slight detour away from New England in honor of Fat Tuesday and make the Louisiana King Cake. This is a cake that is traditionally eaten during Mardi Gras. There is lots of religious significance and there is supposed to be a little baby Jesus baked in there, but most of that freaked me out, so I just went for the cake.

This cake, it turns out, is not a cake at all. It's really a filled sweet bread. You make the dough, let it rise, fill it with a mixture of pecans, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and rum, roll it up, shape it, let it rise again, brush it with an egg-sugar wash, bake it and then top it with a sugar glaze and more decorative sugar. Are you noticing a trend here?

Filling of pecans, spices and rum

The dough is then rolled out, the filling is spread in and then you fold the dough in half and roll it up.
Here it has been filled, rolled and formed into an oval, which is the traditional shape for a King Cake.

Here it has risen for the second time, been egg-washed and baked.

And here it has been glazed and is ready for the application of the decorative sugars.

The application of the decorative sugars are what has allowed this cake to be the thing most likely to be featured on the Cake Wrecks website more than anything else that has ever come out of my kitchen. I'm mildly ashamed, but if you Google King Cake online, they all kind of look like this, so I guess it's not all bad...

This will be eaten at work, assuming anybody's brave enough to go near it. Let alone cut it... I'll post results in the update.

Next stop: Massachusetts Chocolate Chip Cookie Pie. Who wants in?

Stops 2 and 3. New Hampshire and Rhode Island: Pumpkin Pancakes and Johnnycakes

2011-03-07T04:45:00.000-08:00

Since the recipes from New Hampshire and Rhode Island are both breakfast foods, I decided to throw a pancake breakfast for the family. I am not much of a pancake person, so I had to enlist them for tasting troops.

For those of you who haven't had johnnycakes, they're actually more than just a reference to The Sopranos. Johnnycakes are basically pancakes made with cornmeal instead of flour. They go way back to the original European settlers who basically made everything out of cornmeal, which, when you think about the fact that they had to hand grind the corn, was pretty impressive. Brown says in the book that the theory is that the name actually came from the name journeycakes, which makes sense since they can also be cooled and eaten at room temperature and therefore would have made a hearty cake to take on a journey. I've found that modern johnnycakes vary greatly depending on where you get them (the ones at the Town Deluxe Diner in Watertown are to die for). Brown's recipe is pretty standard, cornmeal, water, milk.

I started with the pumpkin pancakes and found that they really did yield nine, which is what it said in the recipe. It wasn't really enough, but I had run out of potato starch, so after that we moved on to the johnnycakes.

I made the pancakes on the griddle with cooking spray and they worked fine. The johnnycakes were done in the frying pan and needed a LOT of butter. I also did one batch of johnnycakes with the optional egg and one without. The batch with the egg came together a lot better as a batter, cooked more evenly and were a lot easier to flip.

Unfortunately, I made this at my parents' house and I forgot my camera, so the pictures are sparse.

Pumpkin pancake batter resting

Pumpkin pancakes served

Johnnycakes in the pan

Johnnycakes on the plate with a pitcher of maple syrup

My most discerning customer munching away on a
pumpkin pancake. Turns out they make good finger food...

Next stop: we're making a side trip to Louisiana to celebrate Mardi Gras with a King Cake

Stop 1. Maine Whoopie Pies

2011-03-01T17:14:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, the road trip has begun. Thanks to my parents, I have the perfect shirt to wear on this adventure (one that I have chopped up and re-sewn, but nonetheless), and there is a department meeting tomorrow, so what better way to kick off this road trip than feeding whoopie pies to a bunch of disgruntled librarians?

And so, we begin our trip in the far northeastern state of Maine where they are known for blueberries, snow and whoopie pies.

Now, in the book, Warren Brown acknowledges that it is true that the whoopie pie most likely originated in Pennsylvania Dutch country, so all you Pennsylvanians, don't get in a huff. He states though, that regardless of this fact, at this point they are ubiquitously MAINE.

I followed the recipe to a T, and these babies came out perfectly. They're all even almost the same size, thanks to my "trigger-release food scooper" (his words, not mine. He also referred to a toothpick as a wooden skewer, but we'll let that go). The cakes are fluffy and moist and the icing is incredible. Like fresh, warm, homemade marshmallow fluff. And now that I know how to make it, I fear for my waist line.

From this first stop on my road trip, I did learn a number of things. 1. Superfine sugar really is SUPERFINE, which means it's even more difficult to clean up when you dump it all over yourself. 2. Shower AFTER baking next time. 3. Cream of Tartar isn't really all that necessary (OK, I lied earlier when I said I followed the recipe to a T. I didn't have cream of tartar, so I left it out and I left out the amaretto cause I think it's gross) if you're willing to put in the extra arm work. 4. Following the baker's notes really pays off. In this case, Warren Brown pointed out that this frosting recipe, which involves whipping egg whites and sugar over a pot of simmering water, needs to be done with a handheld mixer and that if you don't have one, you should be prepared to whisk straight for five minutes. My arm muscles not being what they used to be (?), I borrowed a handheld mixer from our home ec teacher at school. What a difference it made! They're great little gadgets, I might just have to get myself one.

Ingredients ready to go for the cakes.

cakes ready to go into the oven

batch one out of the oven

Ingredients for the frosting. Note here how I used my double boiler. Most of America seems to think it's as good to float a bowl precariously on top of a pot of simmering water, but I say, if you've got a handle, you might as well use it!

I didn't realize how well this picture would come out.

Marshmallow-y goodness!

Cakes waiting to be frosted and sandwiched

frosted

Sandwiched!

And all packed up and ready for school!

So far, the road trip is off to a great start. I'm glad you all are coming along and happy for those of you who get to taste these gems tomorrow.

Next stop: New Hampshire Pumpkin Pancakes and Rhode Island Johnnycakes

*I am happy to say that the whoopie pies were a grand success. They participated at a librarians meeting, social studies department meeting and afternoon snack at my parents'. I think the greatest compliment I received was when my 2 1/2 year old niece turned to me (after going in for her second piece) and said, "I LIKE this!" Grammy spent a good few minutes wiping marshmallow off her face that afternoon... (I wish I had a picture - I'll have to make them again!)

The Road Trip

2011-02-27T08:09:00.000-08:00

Miss Chessman's Cakes is embarking on a new adventure. A metaphorical road trip. This inspired the blog makeover, and is inspiring me to explore baked treats from across the country.

Here's what happened. I was sitting in a bookstore on Valentine's Day waiting for a friend and picked up some cookbooks to browse through. Most of them baking ones were pretty mundane, but one caught my interest: United Cakes of America: recipes celebrating every state by Warren Brown, the author of Cakelove. I didn't know anything about Warren Brown at the time, but have since learned that he is a pretty well-known baker, with a bunch of Cakelove bakery locations in the Washington, DC area and was host of the Food Network show Sugar-Rush. UC of A is his new book, having been published in May of 2010.

In his introduction, he said that listening to people talk about their favorite home-town treats made him start thinking about what we bake and how we bake it. What connects a cake with a state, is it history, heritage, crop production-based? Warren embarked on a mission to find out what cakes (or really baked goods) places are known for and why.

I am piggy-backing off of his work and have decided to bake the United Cakes of America. (I let him do the hard work and jumped then jumped on the bandwagon). A la "Julie and Julia," I have purchased the cookbook and am determined to make every recipe in it. Seems straightforward enough, right? Fifty states, fifty cakes, one year, even giving me two extras to call in sick or lazy. That would have worked if Mr. Brown hadn't decided to write about more than one cake from certain states, bringing his total number of recipes up to 71.

So here's the plan: I will bake every recipe in this cookbook over the period of a year and a half. I'm going to aim to do one recipe every weekend (though I do reserve the right to be sick or lazy once in a while). I will stick to the recipes as closely as I can (i.e. I'll cook the one with bananas even though I hate bananas), but I might make slight changes if I don't think it will change the integrity of the cake for reasons of personal taste or expense (i.e. I might change peaches to plumbs since I don't like peaches, but do like plumbs). In the end, I will have baked 71 recipes, expanded my kitchen resources and made for some very happy co-workers, family and friends. There are recipes in here that seem as simple as pie (ha!) and some that I can't even begin to understand the recipe. But, like every road trip - it's an adventure!

Up first: Maine Whoopie Pies

2011-02-06T14:35:00.000-08:00

In preparation for a tea party a friend and I have in the works, I decided to test some recipes. The one I did today was for tea cakes. The recipe I used was from Williams Sonoma and called Lime Tea Cakelets. It called for the mini cakes to be baked in a mini swirl pan, but they don't make a mini swirl pan, and neither does anyone else as far as I could tell, so I made it in my mother's bundt pan instead.

Adjustments (of course): Besides the bigger pan, I also only had one lime, so I used the lime and then about half an orange. The cake was VERY limey as it was, so I don't think I missed much on that one. I also steeped to Earl Grey tea bags in the milk, assuming they were about a tablespoon filled each. The thought of steeping tea in hot milk was absolute decadence to me, which made me wonder about my view of indulgence. The cake had pretty much no tea flavor, but I don't know if it was just supposed to be subtle, or because of the bags vs. loose tea. Come to think of it, we actually have loose Earl Grey here (at my mother's). I made a pot of it last week and my 2 1/2 year old niece picked up a dried leaf and said, "I can eat this?" We decided on no. Or yes, but it might not taste good. She eats basil off the plant though, so there's no telling what will work.

The cake baked up quite nicely (in 40 minutes for the full-sized), and came out of it's pan nicely as well. Because it's Superbowl Sunday, we indulged and had dessert at around 4pm (which we later decided was tea), and will eat dinner during the game. The whit stuff is whipped cream because, well, why not have whipped cream when you can? We pretended it was clotted cream. We also looked up the recipe for clotted cream in the 1964 Joy of Cooking, but the first direction in the recipe was pretty much literally, "get a cow," so we stuck with whipped. Recipe below the pictures.

Lime Tea Cakelets

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/4 tsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
2 Tbs. Earl Grey tea leaves, steeped in 3/4 cup hot milk for 10-15 minutes
8 Tbs. (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs, beaten with 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract and grated zest of 2 limes
Confectioner's sugar, for dusting

Directions:

Have all ingredients at room temperature.
Position rack in lower thrid of oven and preheat to 325F.
Butter and flour wells of a swirl cake pan; tap out excess flour.
Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt onto a sheet of waxed paper; set aside.
Pour milk through a fine-mesh sieve into a small bowl. Press liquid from tea leaves; discard leaves.
In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat butter on medium speed until creamy, about 30 seconds.
Add sugar and continue beating until light and fluffy, 3-5 minutes; stop mixer and scrap bowl occasionally.
Add eggs, a little at a time, beating well after each addition.
On very low speed, add flour mixture in 3 additions, alternating with milk and ending with flour; blend each addition until just incorporated. Scrape sides of bowl occasionally.
Fill wells in pan a little more than halfway.
Bake until cakes spring back when touched and pull away from sides of pan, 10-12 minutse.
Transfer to a cooling rack, cool to the touch and remove cakes from pan.
Repeat with remaining batter.
Dust with confectioners' sugar.

Serves 12

Adapted from Sweet Miniatures, by Flo Braker (Chronicle Books, 2000).

The "Healthier" Nachos

2011-02-03T08:23:00.000-08:00

I invented healthier nachos. Kind of.

I was making wonton crackers to dip in whatever amazing creations I was going to create in the Magic Bullet and I realized that there was no reason I could make nachos out of them. And it worked!

To make the wonton crackers you buy pre-made wonton wrappers in the produce section of the grocery store (I like the round ones, though the square ones make a more traditional triangle chip). Cut them in half and put them in a single layer onto a baking sheet that's been sprayed with cooking spray. Then spray them again and sprinkle them with salt. Bake them at 375 for between 5 and 10 minutes. I haven't really mastered how long they have to cook for, so I check them after 5 minutes and then check every two minutes or so. There is a very fine line between done and overdone, so when they begin to look brown all over, pull them out.

To make the nachos I overlapped a layer of chips on a baking sheet that I'd lined with parchment (so as not to have to scrape melted cheese off the pan later), sprinkled it with leftover 4-cheese Mexican blend I had leftover, put another overlapping layer on top and sprinkled that with cheese. I baked the whole thing at 400 for about 4 minutes, though again, check that often so the cheese doesn't burn.

I had made a salsa-guacamole mix with the magic blender with tomato, avocado, cilantro, onion, scallion, jalapeno and green pepper, so I used that as a dip.

The chips were really good with the cheese and it's a much lower-fat alternative to corn chips, and better tasting alternative to baked corn chips, which I don't like. And they're all flour, which is good for people who can't eat corn (like my dad).

I didn't take any pictures, but there will definitely be more in my future! I've been toying with the idea of putting the wonton rounds into mini muffin pans and using them as mini bowls or scoops. I'll let you know what happens.

3/7/11 - update
Here are some pics:

The Magic Bullet

2011-02-01T17:08:00.000-08:00

It was my birthday the other day and was given a Magic Bullet as a gift. For those of you who don't know what the Magic Bullet is, you obviously don't watch as many infomercials as I do.

The Magic Bullet is a blender that does it all!

Actually, sarcasm aside, it kind of does do it all, and pretty well, at least as of day three of use.

So far, I've used it to make a sauce for the pulled chicken I made the other night, a peanut sauce for peanut noodles, salsa-mole (that's like salsa with avocados in it), and an edamame dip kind of thing.

It's an interesting little contraption. My main concern at the moment is that it doesn't have a snow-removal attachment (we've gotten a little bit of snow recently.) (That WAS sarcasm.)

Check back for more Magi'bullicious (I just made that word up) recipes.

The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies

2011-01-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

There is a chocolate chip cookie recipe from Cooks Illustrated that I've wanted to make for ages. Since today was a snow day, I decided to indulge myself. So, after shoveling for an hour or so and then cleaning the kitchen, it was cookie time.

The reason I hadn't ever made this specific recipe before is because you have to brown the butter and I am afraid of browning butter. I've done it a few times, for the caramel ice cream cake and brown sugar cookies and every time I feel like I am doing something wrong. For the ice cream cake, I am pretty sure I burnt the butter, the cookies, I think I didn't brown it enough. It was enough to keep me away from anything involving browning and butter, but I put my fear aside today and went for it.

To be honest, I have no idea if I did it right, the butter didn't really seem brown, but the cookies came out incredibly. They are big and gooey and filled with chocolate and have that toffee-ish flavor, just like the recipe said they would. I did a few things differently (because it wouldn't be me if I hadn't). I didn't have dark brown sugar, so I used light brown and molasses (ratio 1 cup light brown sugar:1 tablespoon molasses - thank you to my wonderful brother and sister-in-law for the substitutions bible). I always like the flavor a little better when I use molasses instead of brown sugar because it tastes a little more smokey. And adding the chocolate chips worked out very well. I also added another half cup of chocolate chips because I wasn't adding nuts. I ended up with 18 cookies instead of 16 because my cookie sheets were smaller, so I did three batches.

In conclusion, these cookies were intimidating to make, but if the rest of them are anything like the one I ate 12 seconds after it came out of the oven, they were totally worth the trouble. Now I need to get them out of the house so I can continue to be able to button my pants.

Recipe below the pictures.

PERFECT CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Makes 16 cookies. Published May 1, 2009. From Cook's Illustrated.

Avoid using a nonstick skillet to brown the butter; the dark color of the nonstick coating makes it difficult to gauge when the butter is browned. Use fresh, moist brown sugar instead of hardened brown sugar, which will make the cookies dry. This recipe works with light brown sugar, but the cookies will be less full-flavored. For our winning brand of chocolate chips, see related tasting.

INGREDIENTS

1 3/4	cups unbleached all-purpose flour (8 3/4 ounces)
1/2	teaspoon baking soda
14	tablespoons unsalted butter (1 3/4 sticks)
1/2	cup granulated sugar (3 1/2 ounces)
3/4	cups packed dark brown sugar (5 1/4 ounces) (see note)
1	teaspoon table salt
2	teaspoons vanilla extract
1	large egg
1	large egg yolk
1 1/4	cups semisweet chocolate chips or chunks (see note)
3/4	cup chopped pecans or walnuts, toasted (optional)

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 375 degrees. Line 2 large (18- by 12-inch) baking sheets with parchment paper. Whisk flour and baking soda together in medium bowl; set aside.
2. Heat 10 tablespoons butter in 10-inch skillet over medium-high heat until melted, about 2 minutes. Continue cooking, swirling pan constantly until butter is dark golden brown and has nutty aroma, 1 to 3 minutes. Remove skillet from heat and, using heatproof spatula, transfer browned butter to large heatproof bowl. Stir remaining 4 tablespoons butter into hot butter until completely melted.
3. Add both sugars, salt, and vanilla to bowl with butter and whisk until fully incorporated. Add egg and yolk and whisk until mixture is smooth with no sugar lumps remaining, about 30 seconds. Let mixture stand 3 minutes, then whisk for 30 seconds. Repeat process of resting and whisking 2 more times until mixture is thick, smooth, and shiny. Using rubber spatula or wooden spoon, stir in flour mixture until just combined, about 1 minute. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts (if using), giving dough final stir to ensure no flour pockets remain.
4. Divide dough into 16 portions, each about 3 tablespoons (or use #24 cookie scoop). Arrange 2 inches apart on prepared baking sheets, 8 dough balls per sheet. (Smaller baking sheets can be used, but will require 3 batches.)
5. Bake cookies 1 tray at a time until cookies are golden brown and still puffy, and edges have begun to set but centers are still soft, 10 to 14 minutes, rotating baking sheet halfway through baking. Transfer baking sheet to wire rack; cool cookies completely before serving.

The Coconut Chicken Skewers

2011-01-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

It's been a little bit since I last posted, and it's not that I haven't been cooking, it's just that I having been documenting as well as I should have. For example, I made chocolate mint brownies and peanut butter M&M cookies for New Year's Eve, but I didn't take any pictures of them. And I made Vanilla Cupcakes with Chai Frosting for a coworker's birthday, but I didn't take any pictures of those either. I also recently made Pumpkin Gnocchi from scratch, with Arugula Pistachio Pesto, and didn't take any pictures of that. There's some of that left in the freezer though, so there's still a potential for pictures there.

Something I did take pictures of recently though, were the Coconut Chicken Skewers. I had these at a restaurant a few weekends ago while watching the Pats beat the Dolphins. They were called Tropical Skewers and described as, "chicken tenders coated with shredded coconut and panko breadcrumbs, fried to a golden brown and served with a pineapple curry sauce and fruit salsa." They were incredible. Being that they were incredible, I, of course, had to attempt to recreate them on my own. And of course, since I was making them at home, I had to make the healthy version. Because I have issues. We've discussed this.

I breaded the chicken tenders in panko and coconut and baked them in the oven for a while. I also made a salsa from red pepper, pineapple, jalapeno, mandarin oranges and coconut, as well as a hot sauce from rooster sauce and something else, maybe orange juice (my birthday's in a few weeks, obviously the mind's going).

It all was very tasty, and the colors were pretty for this time of year. But they weren't anywhere nearly as good as the ones at the restaurant. I am not really all that surprised; it's hard to recreated dried goodness with oven baked-ness, but it was worth a shot. I would definitely make them again.

The Chessman Family Christmas

2010-12-25T14:39:00.000-08:00

Christmas is a magic time for Americans. Unless you're a doctor or a plumber, you're pretty much guaranteed a day off from work. So, as a family of Jews who aren't stressing over trees in the living room and gifts for the neighbors, it's the perfect time for a family get-together. And what does any good family do when they get together? They eat!

We started our festivities backwards - with home made cake and ice cream to celebrate my niece Zivah's first birthday. Zivah will turn one on December 30th, but since her parents are abandoning her in favor of warmer weather, we had a party early. Her mother made her an adorable lion-faced cake (which she had absolutely no idea what to do with) and we made Peppermint Chocolate Chunk Ice Cream from scratch. This was my first foray into the world of making ice cream from scratch, and I found it to be pretty easy. Not so easy that I want to make it every night though, which is a bonus for my waist line.

After a lovely Christmas Eve dinner of sushi, we all tumbled off to bed to awake early the next morning. This had less to do with hopes of gifts from Santa and more to do with the fact that small children seem to think that 6 a.m. is an appropriate time to wake up during vacation.

On to prepare Christmas dinner!
On the menu this year:
Herb-rubbed Prime Rib Roast
Roasted Root Vegetables
Balsamic-Honey marinated Ostrich Fillet (yes, you read that right)
Dry Rubbed Steak Tips
Broccoli Souffle

Dessert:
Treacle Sponge (see below)
Apple/Pear/Cranberry puff pastry pie.

You'd think we live in some sort of dystopian society in which you only get meat one day a year, huh? Actually, there was a coupon to a butcher involved.

OK...

Here is my resolution for next year: LEARN TO FOLLOW DIRECTIONS.

For example, when the recipe for the roast says to cook at indirect heat for 1 1/12-1 3/4 hours and after an hour and a half it's still not to temperature, DO NOT listen to your mother when she says to turn on the middle burner. Why not? Because the GRILL WILL CATCH ON FIRE. And with the grill, the meat will also catch on fire. This will all cause me to stare at the grill, holler at the house, and when I realize that nobody can hear me and therefore is coming to rescue me, turn off the grill and remove the still flaming prime rib. I put it out with the pot holder.

Amazingly, the roast turned out ok, a little more cooked than I might have wanted and not with the exact kind of crust I wanted, but it was pretty good. The rest of the food was as well. The ostrich even grew on me. My favorite were the steak tips though, which goes to show that anything dry rubbed with chipotle chili powder is the way to my heart.

OK, the Treacle Sponge. I've wanted to make a treacle tart since Harry Potter came out ten years ago. Of course, until about five minutes ago, I didn't actually know what treacle was. I now know that treacle is the burnoff from molasses, but the stuff you make treacle tart out of is really golden syrup.

I couldn't find golden syrup, but, at the last minute, in the British food sections of the Mashpee Stop & Shop, I did find Treacle Sponge Pudding in a CAN.

That you cook IN A CAN. Although I have been raised to be wary of things you boil in a can for 35 minutes, I have to admit, it was pretty good.

All together, it was a nice Christmas dinner. I have now eaten enough to not have to eat again for a week. Or until later. Where is that goat cheese...

The Reindeer Cookies

2010-12-20T04:44:00.000-08:00

Now, I know what you're thinking, why would a good Jewish girl like me, be making reindeer cookies? And it's a good question. UNTIL you actually see the cookies, which are so cute I couldn't resist. I found them on Bakergirl's blog, where she made creating them appear to be extremely easy. I found that not necessarily to be the case, but I got through it.

Look at these things, just look!

Are they not the cutest cookies you've ever seen?

Basically, they were the cutest cookies ever, and I had a Christmas party to go to, so I figured it was a match made in heaven. They were quite a hit with the kids. And being that they were peanut butter cookies, I didn't kill anyone, so I considered it a double success.

I think Bakergirl's came out better than mine because her cookies were smaller and she had smaller chocolate covered pretzels. I would definitely recommend that. I had to hold the bigger ones in place for a few seconds to ge them to set. Also, since my cookies were bigger, I had to put the noses lower. The first few dozen I made ended up looking like bears with red noses.

All of that aside, the recipe is awesome. The cookies came out smooth and soft, which is normally an issue I have with peanut butter cookies, so this will definitely be my go-to recipe from now on. Everyone at the party, as well as the staff at Metrorock seemed to enjoy them!

Reindeer Cookies

from Bakergirl

3/4 cup peanut butter

1 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar

1/2 cup shortening

3 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 egg

1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

Chocolate-covered mini pretzels

Mini brown M&Ms

Regular-sized red M&Ms

Preheat oven to 375°F.

Combine brown sugar, peanut butter, shortening, milk, and vanilla in large bowl. Beat at medium speed until well blended. Add egg; beat until just blended.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and salt. Add to creamed mixture at low speed. Mix just until blended.

Form dough into 1-inch balls. To make reindeer-shaped cookies, pinch the bottom of the ball slightly to form a point, then gently flatten with your hand. Space cookies about 2 inches apart on a greased cookie sheet and bake for 7 to 8 minutes, until set or just beginning to brown.

Remove from oven and immediately (and gently) press two mini pretzels into the tops of the cookies for the reindeer's antlers. Press two mini brown M&Ms in for the eyes and one red M&M for the nose (or any other color... some of mine ended up with green noses. They might be South Pole reindeer.).

Allow to cool 2 minutes on the baking sheet and then transfer to a wire rack or paper towel to cool completely.

Makes about 40 reindeer cookies.

Source: Peanut butter cookie recipe from Jif.