Chocolate, Caramel, and Walnut Covered Pretzels

For this Valentine's Day dessert, I used a trial and non-error technique. I call it that because even the batches that I didn't serve on Valentine's Day were so delicious that I made sure to diligently snack on them for the next week. This is how I made them:

First I started with 3 ounces of semi-sweet bakers chocolate.

I didn't want the chocolate to burn, so I fashioned my own double boiler out of small and medium sized saucepans. I boiled the water in the medium one and then put the smaller one with the chocolate inside.

Here's another view with the water boiling and the chocolate melted.

Gingerbread People

I was really excited to make gingerbread people again this year. I ripped the recipe out of a Food Network Magazine last year, and I made sure that I kept it so I could use it again. It even made it through several attempts by Camden to eat through all of my cookbooks on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. What made this year's cookies even better was that I also made my own icing, which turned out perfect! Aren't they adorably sweet and  chubby?

After mixing all of the ingredients and rolling out the (really sticky) dough, I had to chill it in the refrigerator for 2 hours. Then, after cutting out my people, I had to refrigerate for 15 more minutes before transferring them to the cookie sheet and then the oven. If the dough isn'tcompletely cold, it sticks and stretches and the people turn out having elongated heads, or oddly shaped limbs.

Last year I borrowed my mother in law's gingerbread man cookie cutter. While Christmas shopping this year, I purchased a little man and a little lady. The cookies were a lot thicker and chewier this year, not as dog-biscuit-hard as usual gingerbread cookies. I attribute that to my crappy rolling pin, which stuck so much (even when floured) that I eventually stopped trying to roll the dough thinner.


To pipe the icing I used I trick that I saw somewhere recently. I think it was Pinterest.  You take your piping bag and put it in a glass. I used a tall beer glass because I wanted to put a lot of icing in at once. Then, you fold the extra plastic at the top over the edges of the glass. With a spoon or a cup, plop your icing right down into it.

 This was my first batch, which were my testers. Testers taste especially great with a glass of cold milk, by the way. The first few did not turn out so great. I always have to get myself adjusted to the piping bag and the consistency of the icing. This was homemade royal icing, so I didn't know how well it was going to work. Luckily, I got used to it pretty quickly and it worked just fine. It dries really fast too, so I didn't need to have cookies all around the house cooling. I could stack them pretty soon after I made them.

Do you like the girls' aprons? I thought they looked really cute. I tried giving the ladies faces, but they just looked like boys with skirts. I tried giving them hair, but that was a disaster. So faceless women in aprons they were. No social message intended. 

I brought the cookies over to all three Christmas events, Christmas Eve dinner with Mom, Christmas morning with the in-laws, and Christmas dinner with Dad. I still have a handful left at home and some leftover dough and icing in the refrigerator.

Last year, with just a few cookies left, Greg decided he would try to decorate a few himself. When I came back into the room, he'd started to make these gingerbread ghettobread men. This year, I asked him, again, to create an alternate lifestyle cookie. He picked the workaholicbread man. Ok, not as funny as last year's...but the decorating was hilariously awful (on both our parts). Can you guess which one of us decorated which ones?

2010 Ghetto Boys

2011 Workaholics

Recipe adapted from Food Network Magazine December (I think) 2010 Issue

Mix in a medium bowl:

31/2 cups of flour (sifted)
1 teaspoon each of baking soda and salt
1tablespoon of ground ginger
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon each ground cloves and allspice

Mix in a larger bowl:

6 tablespoons of melted butter
1 tablespoon of melted shortening
2/3 cup light brown sugar
3/4 cup of molasses
1 egg beaten in with mixer


Beat the flour mixture into the molasses mixture in two additions. Divide the dough in half, wrap in plastic, and pat to 1/2 inch thick. Chill for two hours. When the dough is done chilling, preheat the oven to 350. On a floured surface, roll each piece of dough to 1/4 inch thick. (Mine were slightly thicker). Cut with your cookie cutter and arrange 1 inch apart on parchment paper-lined baking sheets. (I used a silicone baking mat like this, which worked great.) Chill for 15 minutes. (I did this before transferring my cookies to the sheet, so they didn't stretch in transport). Bake until the cookies are golden around the edges. 10-12 minutes. (In my oven it was 10 minutes, even for the thicker cookies, because I didn't want them to get too hard.) Transfer them (after a few minutes) to a rack to cool. Then decorate.

The Icing: From here
3 egg whites
4 cups of powdered sugar

In a small to medium bowl, whisk 3 egg whites until they get frothy. Then, while mixing, add 4 cups of powdered sugar. Keep mixing until the icing is smooth. Use the method I explained earlier to add the icing to a piping bag, snip off the tip of the bag so you have a thin stream of icing, and then decorate!

Thanks for reading my thoughts about food! Happy Holidays!

Eye Candy

Have you ever tasted heaven? Check out this eye (and taste bud) candy.

 Welcome to maple whipped cream on pound cake. 

 

A cup of cream. 

A teaspoon of sugar and a half teaspoon of vanilla extract.

A heavy-handed tablespoon, ahem...or two of Maple Syrup. This is from our Vermont trip.


Whip it with a whisk (luckily I have a whisk attachment on my hand-held mixer) until the cream begins to form stiff peaks. Finally, sprinkle with cinnamon.

Indulge.

My First Blogiversary

Today is my last day of summer vacation and also one year since I started recording my thoughts about food and other ramblings. So, because after today I'll be busy getting back into the swing of things at work, I have a couple of posts that I'd love to share. I've been cooking, baking, and decorating up a storm, snapping pictures along the way. I hope you find some of the stuff cool, cute, or maybe even mildly inspirational.

The first thing I'd like to share is the cake (and other fun stuff) I made for my sister's going away to college party.  She's the baby (9 years younger than me) and is the one that keeps things lively around here. So when she decided to go to college 10 hours way, I thought she definitely deserved a special sendoff. I used some things I'd seen on Pinterest as inspiration. (It's awesome and totally addictive btw).

 I started two days before the party by making an 8" round chocolate layer, which I wrapped in plastic and put in the fridge. With the remaining batter, I made chocolate cupcakes. The next day I used vanilla cake batter to make one vanilla and one strawberry layer. I added a tiny bit of pink food coloring gel and some pureed strawberries to make the last layer pink and add some strawberry flavor and texture. I skinned the strawberries first, so the cake wasn't full of seeds.

Then, I had to level and stack all of the layers. This was really nerve racking, because for two days,  I'd been preparing three cake layers with only one 8" pan, so I had to keep juggling the cakes, swapping out, cleaning, and re-greasing the pan once each layer had cooled. The last thing I wanted to do was repeat that whole process again.

By the way, here's where I get the depth and breadth of my baking knowledge. It's cutting edge.

Google says there is a contraption out there that levels cakes easily, but I of course don't have that equipment. So after clicking the next clink, I used the advice from a very smart sounding person (in the ways of cake leveling), which was sliding the knife around the circumference of the cake cutting out even rings until you got to the center. But it didn't come out perfectly.  Finally, I just went for it, (a la what I've seen on the cake boss) sticking my bread knife in the cake horizontally and sawing across the diameter hoping that it turned out even. That worked just as well. Better actually, much easier than the ring method.  I guess I didn't need Chef Google after all.

The top

Oh, and before I forget, before the leveling, there was this small snafu. Come on, you didn't think I'd get away accident-free on my first time, did you?

I (while subduing my inner freak-out-attack) mixed up a "patch" icing and used my finger to coat the inside of the hole and then slid the missing chunk back in (luckily it was already cool and not too crumbly). Then I cement it shut with the patch icing.

After all of that, here are the three layers together ready to be iced and put on my new cake platter $14 at Home Goods. Whoop whoop!

I crumb coated each layer with my homemade strawberry icing, again flavored with juice from pulverized fresh strawberries. No artificial flavor comes close.  I also added just a hint of pink food coloring gel. Insert super smiley proud moment below.

Then, I refrigerated it overnight. I imagined that I was going to do something super cool when I frosted up the final layer, but I just couldn't bring myself to mess with it too much. The super cool (in my world)  surprise was on the inside.

The day of the party, I topped the leftover-batter cupcakes with raspberries and stuck them on my Home Goods platter ($6!). I also set out the cake and a few other sparkly and pink decorations.

 I twisted glimmery silver ribbon around some candles that I had leftover from my wedding and plucked a couple rosebuds from the garden out back. The mini-vase was also left over from my wedding.

 I made these for Sarah's dorm room out of some flat canvases that she can probably hang with command strips. To make them, I placed painters tape in a diagonal pattern and mixed up a shade of pink I thought she might like using acrylic paint.Then I just painted away and pulled off the tape after the two layers were just beginning to dry.

Towards the end of her party, we cut the cake so fast that I didn't get time to snap a good-lighting/crumb-free picture. That's ok, I was just happy it turned out just as I planned. We served up some Neapolitan ice cream on the side. Yummy!

 It was so...darn...good.  I had to use every ounce of decorum in my soul not to grab this slab with my hands and eat it like a ravenous wolf. So moist and melt in your mouth with all of the different flavors. Uh! - Sorry, I just needed a little satisfaction-grunt. 

Anyways, all grunting aside, I hope you like the cake idea. I wish it was mine, but it was something that I tagged on Pinterest a few weeks ago. It did work out well though (besides the small snafu) and I'm notorious for royally messing stuff up the first time. (I confess I deleted the pictures of the first homemade brownies I made from my camera earlier this summer. It was just too humiliating to have to re-live).

I'm not yet ready to start my fall pie-making just yet. I'm still clinging on to the last few weeks of summer! I'm making hamburgers and slicing up watermelon to the very end!! Thanks for still reading my thoughts about food- even one whole year later!

Stay tuned for some before and after pictures of the house in a bit!

That Little Something

 I made these for my mom's birthday in May. I used a simple chocolate buttercream recipe for the frosting. That little something I added was almond extract. I also chopped almonds in the food processor and added them to the frosting to add some texture. A few sliced almonds on top added the perfect touch.

The cupcakes were just from a box of yellow cake mix.

The frosting consisted of:

3/4 cup butter softened
8 cups of powdered sugar (I use a few cups less so it's not too sickly sweet)
1/3 cup of milk
1/2 cup of cocoa
1 teaspoon of almond extract

Directions:

Beat butter on medium until smooth
Beat 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
Gradually add 2 cups of powdered sugar, beating well.
Beat in remaining sugar (taste to get the desired sweetness)
Beat in additional milk to reach spreading consistency.

Use a disposable piping bag and snip about an inch off the end to get the dollop shape.


Altered recipe from Better Home's and Gardens New Cook Book 14th edition

My New Friend

Hello Tofu, nice to make your acquaintance. Will you please come into my home, make yourself comfortable in the refrigerator, but stay far away from my husband; he doesn't want your kind around here.

Tofu is my new friend. We found each other right between the milk and the eggs. Hidden there is, what I can only refer to as the "other" section. There are all kinds of freaky meat substitutes, "chicken" nuggets, spicy Italian "sausage," and meatless "burgers." To me, a substance that has no shape, consistency, smell, or taste that comes from nature, is probably not meant to be eaten. Even rotten vegetables are going through a natural decomposition process. But, I want to be open-minded, and soy is a plant, therefore I will not discriminate. So I brought my square, white, squishy friend home for a trial visit.

As it turns out, tofu is a very agreeable substance. I made Tofu Curry (with chicken on the side for Greg) and after two tries I got a pretty great result. Unfortunately, my friend Amanda was the recipient of try #1, with which I used "firm" tofu and  bit too much curry sauce. Try #2 turned out a bit better because I used "extra firm," which has a more meat-like consistency.

I also experimented with a dessert, which turned out to be a fantastic idea. I started out with putting the tofu in the food processor, and mashing the crap out of it. Then I added some baking chocolate, cocoa, sugar, and water. I mixed and mashed this until it was creamy and whipped. Then I chilled it overnight. The consistency was perfect! It was so chocolatey. No one would ever know that I used tofu! Here are some pictures!

Success!

Well, I know that I said I would post this on Wednesday, but a girl with a full time job, a new-ish husband and a tv schedule (...cough, cough..I mean work out schedule)  is very busy! Anyways, I'm sure if you read my last post, you already guessed. I finally found success with my holy grail, Madeleines.  No Alps this time; no dry cornbread taste. Hooray!  I took pictures, just to prove it!

No Mountain Range This Time

Normal Rounded Backs

Consistent Shape and Texture

Decorated and Ready to Eat.

My secret? I used a recipe out of a baking book, not a cookbook. If you must know, it was Baking with Julia that saved me from food/blogging humiliation. Luckily, I don't have to hang up my apron and keyboard just yet. .