Sometimes I Even Amaze Myself

The other day I bought a bag of these:

My absolute, hands down favorite candy bars EVAH.

so that I could make these delicious sounding cupcakes. But then I haven’t been in the mood to make cupcakes lately, and I had a cookie-baking mood come over me, so I decided to chop up the bars and use them in cookies instead! Absolutely brilliant, though I had to tweak the dough recipe a skosh to allow for the extra caramel.

C is for cookie!

You definitely want to bake these on parchment paper — even in the spots where the caramel bubbles out the sides it won’t stick as long as you give it a few minutes to cool. Have I told you about how parchment paper is my new favorite thing? About 6 months ago I was baking a batch of cookies and for some reason they were sticking really badly to the sheet. I keep meaning to get a silpat but then forgetting, so I figured I would just have cookie pieces instead of cookies out of that batch. Then I figured I’d give parchment paper a try (only because I happened to have some on hand) and OMG it’s like magic! They just slip right off the paper! I might still get a couple of silpats, just because I like the idea of being able to prep several sheets at once, but seriously, people — parchment paper. Don’t bake without it.

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 c. unsalted butter, at room temp.
• 3/4 c. granulated sugar
• 3/4 c. brown sugar, packed
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 2 1/2 c. flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 5 oz. Ghirardelli milk chocolate chips
• 1 bag Fun Size 100 Grand bars (about 20 bars, I think, so you could also get 10 regular size candy bars)

Preheat oven to 375°. Cream butter and sugars together. Add eggs and vanilla, blending thoroughly. Add 1 c. of the flour, the baking soda, and the salt. When thoroughly mixed, add remaining flour. Beat on medium high speed for about a minute. Chop 100 Grand bars (Note: This is much, much easier to do if you cut them lengthwise first and then slice across the width to make approximately chip-sized bits). Add 100 Grand bar bits and chocolate chips to dough, mixing thoroughly. Drop spoonfuls onto parchment paper lined cookie sheet.

Bake at 375º for 8-9 minutes, until edges are just brown. Remove from oven and cool on cookie sheet 5-10 minutes, until any leaky caramel is solid. Transfer to wire rack to finish cooling.

Expanding My Horizons

And my waistline, but so, so worth it. I came across this thing called Taste & Create a few months ago, where people make food from each other’s blogs (you sign up and get assigned a partner each month — it’s very cool). I decided to participate for the first time this month, and my partner was Always Eat On the Good China. The hardest part was choosing a recipe to make (and I’m totally going to make more of them — she has some really nommy sounding stuff!) but I finally settled on the Chicken Puffs. Chicken, bacon, cheese, puff pastry…what could possibly go wrong? Nothing, in this case. They were amazing.

Delish.

I did modify the recipe a little to use what I had on hand (for example, I used goat cheese instead of cream cheese), and since I’m not a huge fan of plain chicken, I also decided to play around with marinades* and tried something new: OJ and balsamic vinegar. Yeah, that’s a keeper (1c. OJ + 1 Tbsp BV to cover about 1.5lbs of cubed chicken). She mentions in her post about the recipe that although the pic shows a whole chicken breast, she now cuts it into bite size chunks, so I went that way with it. And I didn’t mix anything up for the cream cheese mixture — I just threw a bunch of goat cheese on top and then topped it with some fresh basil, because I am lazy. Oh! Also instead of spraying my cookie sheet I just lined it with parchment paper which works beautifully for keeping stuff from sticking. And I didn’t brush with the egg wash, but that was just because I totally forgot to do it. Seemed to come out fine, but they would’ve been a little crispier with the wash.

The pile of nommy stuff going into the middle of the puff: chicken, goat cheese, bacon, fresh basil.

So, modifications I’ll probably make next time I make this (because there will be a next time): First off, I think I’m going to try it as a pot-pie kind of thing…the puff pastry-to-filling ratio is just really high. Now, it’s puff pastry, so it’s not like my tastebuds are complaining, but I think it will be just as tasty topped with the puff instead of surrounded by it. Second — you might want to sit down for this one — I’m going to leave the bacon out. I just really didn’t feel like it added much to the flavor experience in this case. Weird, I know, but there you are. I also will probably try different marinade/cheese combos — I think this would be great with something spicy on the chicken and cheddar cheese, for instance. And there you have it…my first Taste & Create. This was tons of fun — I’m totally going to do it again next month!

Fresh from the oven.

*A note on using a marinade on something you’re going to wrap in puff pastry and bake: you need to dry it out before you put it in the pastry. Throw it in a saute pan and brown it — you’ve got lots of sugar in this marinade, so even let it caramelize a bit. You don’t need to worry so much about it being cooked through — the baking in the oven part will take care of that. And it won’t get too dry b/c you’ve added all that moisture to it.

Smooth Like Billy Dee Williams

Or like, you know, a smoothie. I haven’t given y’all a recipe for awhile now, mostly because it’s been too damn hot to bake, and baking’s really mostly what I do. But, here’s a recipe that’s perfect for the hot weather and super fast and easy to boot. My favorite thing about this smoothie is that you can use pretty much any juice, yogurt, and frozen berries you have on hand. The one in the picture was made with strawberries, lemonade, a little orange juice, and plain yogurt. I love using the mixed berries with OJ or mango juice, too. Pretty much anything goes here.

Works Every Time!

Recipe

Ingredients:

• 2/3 c. yogurt (I just use plain, but you can really use whatever you have on hand if you think the flavor will work.)
• 2/3 – 1 c. juice (Again, whatever you have hanging around that you like is fine.)
• 1 1/2 c. frozen berries (Really feel like I’m repeating myself at this point, but use what you like)

Place all ingredients in blender*. Blend until smooth. If your smoothie is too thick, add more juice. If it’s too thin, add more yogurt. Serve and enjoy.

*I have one of these fancy-schmancy personal smoothie makers and I absolutely love it. Can’t recommend it highly enough. If you get one of these, just fill the berries up to the “Frozen ingredients” max line.

Not a Walking Carpet, but still Chewy

(See what I did there?) Back in the olden days, when not everyone had one of these fancy blog-thingies and in fact, hardly anyone who wasn’t some sort of supergeek even drove on the Internet Superhighway (remember that?) you could subscribe to these things called “newsgroups”.* Being a fairly geeky, cutting edge kind of gal, I joined several. Many of them were dedicated to recipes — you may have noticed I like to dabble a little in the kitchen. The following recipe came from one of those long-forgotten (by me, anyhow) recipe groups. If anyone knows the original source, I’m happy to add the info.

I cannot even tell you how glad I still have some of these so I can go eat them after looking at this picture. NOM.

A note before I pass this one along. It is very simple to make, but it is also a giant pain in the ass. The results are worth it, but I generally save these cookies for people who are very special to me, or who have something I want very badly.

*Yes, I know newsgroups are still around. But most people who joined the interwebs after, say, Y2K probably don’t. Work with me here, people.

Recipe

Makes about 4 dozen

Ingredients:

• 1 c. butter, softened
• 1 c. granulated sugar
• 1 c. packed brown sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 1/4 c. all purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 3/4 c. cocoa
• app. 48 Rolos (A note on the Rolos: it’s usually cheaper to buy them buy the bag, but then you have to shuck them as they are wrapped individually. If you buy them by the roll, you save yourself that step. The choice is yours.)

Cream butter and sugars together until smooth. Add eggs and vanilla, and beat until fully incorporated. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking soda, and cocoa. Gradually add to butter mixture, beating well. (Seriously, you want to do this very gradually, or you will end up wearing much of the cocoa and flour.) Cover and chill for at least two hours (I usually do it overnight — you want it to be really chilled). Remove wrappers from Rolos if necessary (see note above) and chill them as well.

Preheat oven to 375F. Using a spoon, scoop out enough dough to cover one Rolo. Roll dough into a ball around Rolo and place on cookie sheet. Repeat until your cookie sheet is full, placing cookies about an inch apart. Bake for 8 minutes. remove from oven and let cool on cookie sheet for 2 minutes, then transfer to wire rack to cool completely. While each sheet is baking, put remaining dough and Rolos back into the refrigerator. If it is particularly warm in your kitchen, you may even need to put the dough in the freezer — it’s really almost impossible to work with if it’s even a little soft. (Heh. TWSS.)

Bakin’ with Bacon

A couple months ago I was kicking around the interwebs and came across this post featuring bacon wrapped in cinnamon rolls.

Droooool...

I drooled, and decided I needed to make me some of those. However, I’m really trying to get away from things like premade dough, cake mixes, etc. Mostly just because I’ve found that the more non-chemical-laden things I eat, the worse the chemical-laden things taste to me. And really, cinnamon rolls are not that hard to make from scratch, especially if you have a bread machine.

Before the feeding frenzy...see how easy the foil makes it?

So I dug around in my recipe books and found a super simple recipe in my Best of Baking tome. The general consensus was that stuffing cinnamon rolls with bacon was genius, but the rolls themselves were a bit blah. So I fiddled with the dough a bit and used a trick that I use when I make monkey bread: add some spice to the dough itself. Sure enough, that’s all it needed to kick this up from yummy to I-wanna-eat-the-whole-plate.

Recipe

The easy way requires a package of bacon (pref. maple if you can get it) and a can of your favorite cinnamon rolls. Cook bacon, lay out dough, put slices on dough, roll and bake according to manufacturer’s instructions. Note: the original post I saw indicated that the bacon was added uncooked to the rolls and then baked. I think that’s probably fine for the quick’n'dirty way, but with the long way, below, there’s a long rise time and I wasn’t comfortable leaving the bacon at room temp for that long. I am not a fan of overcooked bacon and find that the cooked bacon in the rolls below stays nice and chewy.

The real homemade way starts out and ends up the same, but you gotta make the cinnamon rolls yourself. I think it’s worth the effort. (Recipe adapted from Betty Crocker’s Best of Baking)

Ingredients:

Bread:

• 2 1/2c. flour
• 1/4c. sugar
• 3/4c. + 2Tbsp. water
• 1tsp. salt
• 1tsp. bread yeast
• 1tsp. cinnamon
• 1/2tsp. pumpkin pie spice

Filling:

• 1lb. bacon (maple if you can get it)
• 1/3c. sugar
• 2tsp. cinnamon
• 2 Tbsp. butter, softened

Glaze:

• 1c. confectioner’s sugar
• 1 to 2Tbsp. milk

Place all ingredients for bread into bread machine, in the order recommended by manufacturer and run dough cycle.

Grease 9x9x2 pan lined with aluminum foil. Cook bacon until just done — don’t get it crispy or it won’t roll up! Combine sugar and cinnamon for filling. Flatten dough into 9″ square on lightly floured surface. Spread butter on top surface of dough. Sprinkle cinnamon/sugar combo. Lay bacon in strips across dough (in one direction only, no overlapping). Roll up tightly and pinch the edge into the roll to seal it. Cut into 1″ slices. Place in prepared pan. Cover and let rise until doubled, app. 1 to 1 1/4 hours.

Preheat oven to 375F. Bake 25-30 min., until golden brown. Let cool for about 10 minutes in pan, then lift out using aluminum foil. Combine powdered sugar with milk gradually until desired consistency is reached, then pour over warm rolls.

Submitting to Yeastspotting

Because you always want s’more!

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. It brings me so many awesome things that I want to make, both of the food and craft varieties (not to mention all of the cool articles I get from feeds like @NASA, @mashable, @arstechnica, @blastr, etc.) that sometimes I get a little overwhelmed. But sometimes, it brings me to something awesome that reminds me of something I’ve already done! The other day, I clicked on the link to this, which reminded me of my own super easy, no bake S’mores Pie recipe from last year. Here it is, for your nomming pleasure:

Recipe

• 1 graham cracker pie crust, baked*
• 1 bucket Two Bite Brownies
• 1/2 package mini marshmallows (or giant delicious ones cut into bite sized pieces)
• Chocolate syrup (I’m a Hershey’s girl, but use what you like)

Preheat oven to 350 deg.
Break brownies into large chunks (approximately quarters) and place evenly in pie crust. Cover with marshmallows. Place in oven for 7-10 minutes, until marshmallows are lightly browned. Let cool, then drizzle with chocolate syrup.

* I used a pre-made crust because I am ridiculously lazy. I found that it did not hold together at all well, and if you have any inclination at all to bake your own, definitely go with that. The crumbliness of the pre-made crust was not a deal breaker, but I’ll definitely make my own next time.

Note: The above is the original recipe I typed up last year. I actually did not re-read this recipe before I re-created it this time, and I should have. I again used a pre-made crust and it again crumbled. I also just popped it under the broiler this time, which browned the marshmallows but didn’t let them heat long enough to get nice and gooey. So, I strongly recommend foregoing the pre-made crust and the broiler. But really, it’s delicious either way.

Cuppycakes

Might not be the prettiest cupcake I've ever seen, but it's one of the best I've ever eaten.

In case it’s not clear, I love to bake. Like really, seriously, I LOVE to bake. I have been known to bake 4-5 different kinds of cookies in a single day, in the summer, in a non-air-conditioned house. I’m pretty darn good at it, too. I make all kinds of different varieties of breads and pies and cookies and other nommy things…but I’ve never really been successful with cakes, for some reason. I have trouble with the flavor and texture and they just don’t turn out right somehow. So I’ve always relied on…shameful pause…mixes.

And really, I was okay with that. Cake is rarely eaten at my house (the incident when I ate an entire double layer cake by myself in under 36 hours notwithstanding), so on the rare occasion when I needed a cake, a mix got the job done. But now I have kids, who expect fabulous cakes. And while so far they have been satisfied with the mix cakes I’ve used as the base for those fabulous cakes, I just don’t feel right about not making their cakes from scratch. So I decided to work on my cake baking skills. On the day I decided this and started cruising the internet for cake recipes to try out, this recipe came across my Twitter feed.

Cupcakes have long been my nemesis. I can’t even make decent cupcakes out of a box. The bottoms always get burned, and they’re dry but somehow also underbaked in the center…I dunno. It’s weird. But seriously…Key Lime Cupcakes? Yeah, I had to have me some of those. So I started down the ingredients list, checking to make sure I had everything on hand.  (Protip: Always make sure you have all the ingredients or adequate substitutions before you begin mixing. I cannot tell you how completely it sucks to get halfway through your batter/dough making only to discover you’re an egg short or are somehow completely out of flour.) That’s when I discovered that this recipe called for seven whole eggs. No, seriously. Let me say that again. Seven. Whole. Eggs.

I happened to have seven eggs on hand, but that just seemed ludicrous to me. I mean, seven egg whites I could see, or even seven yolks. But seven whole eggs? I thought not. So I Googled “key lime cupcake recipe” or some such thing and came up with this recipe, which was much more reasonable in the egg department. I did decide to stick with the original glaze, though I actually found it a little overpowering and I think next time I’ll try a lime cream cheese frosting. Also, I left out the food coloring.

The cupcakes, though, were to die for. They were dense, but not heavy. Velvety on the tongue. Lovely crisp flavor. No burnt bottoms. I’m actually going to try it without the lime juice at some point and see if they serve well as a plain cake base. I strongly suspect they will. It will be delicious to find out.

ETA: Almost forgot — this recipe calls for some self-rising flour, which I never have on hand. Here’s a quick and easy substitute, made with stuff I do generally keep on hand.

Let them eat cake

Some of my fondest childhood memories are of the birthday cakes my mother baked for me. A few that stand out are the “doll” cake (if you’re unfamiliar, the cake is mounded and has a hole in the center where the doll goes — it comes about up to the doll’s waist — and the cake and the doll’s upper half are frosted to look like a ballgown), the bunny cake (shaped pan, and a bajillion little frosting dots to decorate it), and when I was a little older, a delicious poppy-seed cake. Whatever I asked for, Mom made, and I always loved it. I’ve continued this tradition with my kids, especially Becky (mostly because Zack hasn’t had a party yet that wasn’t just family).

The Force is strong in this one

First there was the Darth Vader cake, which was also my first experience with fondant (I cheated and used the DV cake pan to mold the fondant. I also bought enough to make two cakes so I could practice, which turned out to be a Very Smart Idea.). To be fair, that was really the cake Mommy wanted to make — Becky only cared that the cake was blue, which — thanks to the miracle of food coloring — it was.

"She may not look like much..."

Last year, though, she requested a Millennium Falcon cake. This was considerably more challenging as I had to actually sculpt the cake. I got it done, though, and am still pretty proud of the job I did on that one.

This year, she wanted an Ariel cake. In case you don’t have a small girl-child, Ariel is the name Disney execs gave to the Little Mermaid when they bastardized the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale (the irony of my daughter loving the movie that completely ruined my favorite childhood fairytale is not lost on me). I am always up for a challenge, but I also know my limitations, and “cake shaped like a mermaid” is definitely outside my artistic range. So I suggested that perhaps we do something similar to last year’s Millennium Falcon cake and instead of Ariel herself, the cake could be a castle and then we’d just have the action figures, which would later be hers to play with. She readily agreed (Mommy is no dummy — I knew I’d get her with the toys), but asked that the cake be pink. Not a problem.

One of the castle cakes, pre-frosting

See, I knew that Williams-Sonoma had a cake pan that’s actually shaped like a castle, and I figured I’d just pull the same trick I did with the Darth Vader cake pan. This was going to be easy. Except it never is. First, it turned out that the castle cake pan is smallish. This one was easily solved…I’d just make a 13×9 sheet cake base. Not a problem. I decided to frost the sheet cake to look like the ocean and then decorate with aquarium plants to really give it that “under the sea” vibe. Once Becky found out there would be two cakes, she requested that the base be strawberry and the castle be vanilla. Also not a problem. I baked both cakes (from a mix — I’m still working on perfecting my cake baking skills) Thursday night so they’d be nice and cool for me to decorate Friday night and ready to go Saturday (her party was at one, but I wanted plenty of cushion built into the schedule).

The frosted base cake.

Friday night rolled around and I got the frosting made (cream cheese, because the birthday girl digs it) and the base cake frosted (after repairing the giant hole in the middle where it stuck to the pan). The rest of the evening went a bit like this: Roll out the hot pink fondant and try to put it into cake pan. No good — couldn’t get it down into the pan without tearing it. Reroll and drape over cake, then put pan over cake. Still no good — the details on the cake pan were just too fine and delicate to show without there being plenty of pressure to make an impression. Press cake down into pan in attempt to get impressions. Cake and fondant both ruined. Curse loudly and colorfully and send Daddy to the store for more cake mix and cream cheese (because clearly fondant ain’t going to cut it, and now aren’t I glad that I bought that cake decorator gun on clearance last month?). Mix new cake, pour into pan and put into oven, sit down on couch to relax. Realize ten minutes in that I forgot to grease and flour the “nonstick” pan and cross fingers that it really is “nonstick” but it’s already almost midnight so I won’t find out until morning.

Morning comes and I attempt to remove the cake from the pan. I’m not really sure what they mean by “non-stick” but it’s definitely not related to whether the contents of the pan will stick to the pan, because they will, quite tenaciously. More cursing, and also being glad that Daddy got two cake mixes when he went to the store the previous evening. Third cake mixed, pan prepped (I can be taught), into the oven. From the oven immediately into the fridge, where it has plenty of time to cool while I whip up another batch of frosting. Most of the frosting gets tinted pink, with a little set aside for brown (the door), light blue (windows), and lavender (trim). Cake is cooled, pops right out of pan and I plunk it down on the frosted base.

Look! A pink castle! (Pre-accessorization, obviously.)

Now is the moment of truth. See, I really don’t have a lot of any experience frosting things in a decorative manner, but I really, really want to preserve as much of the stone detailing as possible on the castle — that’s what makes it so neat. So I try a few shots on a plate for practice and it looks pretty good. Time for the real thing…and it worked! It came out really great. I will say that cream cheese frosting is not the best choice for elaborate frosting stuff like this — it’s a little too soft, which is why the castle looks a little melty. But really, I love how it came out. It got lots of oohs and aahs, and two of the moms at the party asked where I bought it!!! Most importantly, Becky absolutely loved it.

And here it is again, fully accessorized.

One awesome cake, one happy birthday girl.

Zack has already requested a train for his birthday in November. Should be fun!