Chocolate Apple Pie

Chocolate Apple Pie

I saw this recipe on Dutch Girl Cooking for Chocolate Apple Pie and was intrigued. My sister is a huge apple pie fan, so I wanted to try something different.

I made it. It was ok. I mean not terrible, but just did not tickle my fancy. Just throwin’ it out there in case anyone else saw the recipe. I couldn’t even tell you what made it just ‘ok’. I think my taste buds didn’t like the dark chocolate with the apples. Not that I don’t mind chocolate covered apples, but this wasn’t as sweet.

It’s summer, I’m on my summer diet of veggies and fruits so not too much to report. Although I must tell everyone about my garden soon.

Bake Sale Sugar Cookies

I know, I’m a failure at this whole blog thing. As many of you may know, I’m going to school part-time 4 days a week after work. That pretty much leaves me out of the kitchen and with no down time. Especially with work being so busy.

I work in science publishing and recently we took part in the JP Corporate Challenge. To raise money for it we had a bake sale at work. I decided to make sugar cookies and attempt a science theme to them. I wanted to make something more stable for packaging purposes, so I used CakeJournal’s shortbread/sugar cookie recipe and Joy of Baking’s chocolate sugar cookie recipe.

I attempted to draw out a double helix and the molecular formula for sucrose, but I was afraid no one would get it. So instead I stuck with pigs (in response to the H1N1 “epidemic”), beakers, hearts, and happy faces. I was a little sloppy, but then again I had a zillion to do with not a lot of time. I suppose that’s not an excuse… oh well. Anyway, the run was a lot of fun! Can’t wait for next year.

Complaint: Bitch

I’m an old lady and clip coupons. Don’t make fun, it saves me at least $10 bucks at the grocery store each visit. Anyhow, I had one to a wine store a little while ago. Something like 20% off for 6 bottles or more. My roommate and I decided to stock up on wintry day and it’s been great to have bottles in reserve at the apartment.

Being the frilly broads that we are, we were attracted to this bottle of Grenache called ‘Bitch’ because it’s pink, cute and has a cool name. We saved it for a special occasion and last night served to be a perfect night since all we wanted to do was bitch about well… life stuff.

Here’s my complaint, this bottle took me a good 15 friggin’ minutes to open. You know how bottles usually have that plastic on top that you unveil before you uncork it? Well this magical bottle was a damn bitch (excuse the pun) to open because it was a metal top. Who the hell does metal or tin?! I seriously cut up my fingers trying to get this bottle open. This morning’s shower stung a little on my hands. 

Again, why on earth would they do this? Why is it not corked? Now I know that supposedly the plastic corks are better because they don’t let air escape, but this had NONE. Of course none of the liquid inside could have been aerated due to the intense METAL packaging. Is there a wine guide out there that can teach me about the different packaging and WHY?!?!  Wine is supposed to calm us, not frustrate or bloodyus up! I don’t even care if I appear as a naive wine novice.

Side-note, this was a particularly good bottle. That shocked me since I expected it to be just a silly gimmicky brand with no real character.

Fail: Crumb Cake

Ok… So I never said that everything I make is a complete success. My friend Matt came over last week for grilled apple cheese (something I fell upon in Colorado and instantly fell in love). I wanted to also make dessert, there are a few foods that I know he loves, like anything with blueberries. Since those are out of season I went for his second favorite: Crumb Cake.

He loves tons of crumbs too (I think most people feel this way, I’m impartial). I found this recipe on Laura Rebecca’s Kitchen which she adapted from Cook’s Illustrated. It seemed perfect since the crumbs call for a cup more flour then the actual cake. Well… that wasn’t the case.

It looked great when I took it out of the oven the night before he came. But the next day the middle had completely sunken. I cooked it in a 9″ spring form (the recipe called for a bigger pan) and even made a few muffins from the dough. The crumbs were so heavy they just sank the batter in and didn’t let it cook. The cake was half raw even though I had kept it in the oven about 20 minutes longer then the recipe called for.

Of course, Matt being the gentleman that he is said “Crumb cake is supposed to be half raw, this is perfect” as he dug into it. Haha, how nice of him to eat the whole piece and preted it’s better mushy and raw. So word of advice, too many crumbs CAN be a bad thing!

Snickerdoodles

I had no idea what a snickerdoodle was until last week. I was in the mood for a cookie. A sugar cookie was too boring, everything else was too complicated. That’s when I found it! The snickerdoodle!

It’s a sugar cookie with cinnamon! I love AllRecipes.com because of the rating system and everyone’s comments. I used this recipe (but doubled the baking soda) and it was incredibly delicious. Don’t tell my roommate, but I used Splenda in the cookie batter (not on the outside) because I wanted to lower the calorie count. She did not remark, so obviously you couldn’t taste it.

I am getting better at taking the cookies out of the oven early. It may look a tad under cooked, but that’s when you will get a chewy cookie.

Winter Soups

It’s an incredibly awkward time of the year. It’s freezing, but random days are filled with warm breezes that cause sore throats. New vegetables are around the corner, but it’s just shy of being in season. Yet we try to be in shape and eat healthy, but winter depression is making that hard.

The best solution for this (in terms of food) is soup. I recently made cabbage rolls and had some cabbage left. What better solution then to make minestrone soup? I figured since I would be canning most of the minestrone, I might as well make a second soup to go with it.

My second soup… Well, I guess you can say it’s vegetable soup? Not sure, I made it on the fly. I saw this Curry soup recipe in 101 Cookbooks and loved the color of all the chunky greens and tofu. I made something totally different, but that’s where the inspiration came from. I basically cooked up couscous in a vegetable broth of peas, asparagus, cauliflower and broccoli.

I realized when throwing random things in both my soup pots that it’s hard to screw up soup (at least when you are doing an all vegetable soup). I cannot think of any broth, cream or vegetable that does not go with another, can you?!

As for the the minestrone that I made, I loved it because it wasn’t even really a ’soup’. It was basically like a giant salad of cooked vegetables. I’m aware that some people may complain about this, but when you’re living single you have no one to answer to. Now I am happily set in my pantry until the spring rolls around.

Mike’s Birthday Cake

In December my sister asked me to make a birthday cake for her boyfriend’s 27th birthday. Since I can never refuse a cake opportunity, I gladly accepted. She told me to make anything I wanted, so long as it was big. He always seemed to rave about cake that looks like food so I figured that was probably the best thing to make for him.

The only problem was that none of us (Mike, my sister or I) like fondant. Without fondant, it’s not quite as clean looking. I used only Swiss butter-cream and a chocolate mousse butter-cream, which didn’t really look too great, but at least it was edible to our desires.

The idea was to do a bottom row that looked like fried chicken, 2nd layer spaghetti and meatballs, third later hot dogs with ‘Happy Birthday Mike’ written in ‘ketchup’ and the top layer as a Monster energy drink (his favorite).

Again, this really is not one of the best cakes that I ever made, but it was great practice. I learned that unless you’re making typical tiers (staircase square/round layers), it’s very hard to put together the cake. The butter-cream made it hard to manage and things were sliding all over the place!

In the end it was fun and Mike seemed to like it. That’s all that matters. I also got a lot of practice at perfect my cake recipes, which I think I have down pat.

Rachel Ray!

Woohoo! I’m going to go see The Rachel Ray show in February. My wonderful mother will accompany me! I’m so excited.

Although I do realize half of it is a talk show and she’s not my favorite cook in the world, I’m very excited to be there and see the process of making a food segment. I would much rather see Iron Chef made, but I hear thats invite only. Is there anyone out there who can get me an invite?!?

Everyone is dieting (including myself), so I’m cutting back on my time in the kitchen.  So typical this time of year, isn’t it?

Christmas Tree – UPDATE

Everyone told us not to keep our Christmas tree up for as long as we did. Did Liz (roommate) and I listen? No. Of course not! We did not listen because coming home and sitting by a lit up Christmas tree feels so relaxing. Or maybe we did not listen because we’re both stubborn? Whatever the case may be, it kicked us in the ass.

The tree had been up for exactly a month. It sure seemed a lot longer when we took it down since it was bone dry (odd since there was water in the holder). There were more pine needles creating a puddle in our tree skirt then there was on the tree.

My parents have bought a real tree my entire life and I have never seen such a sad display of nature. I’m pretty sure we will be cleaning random pine needles until next Christmas.

Next year we plan to research our trees on how sharp the needles are (this one was extreme!) and more importantly how long they last. I’m too ashamed to take a picture of what it looks like on our stoop. It’s been out there for 4 days now and it’s so much sadder then in these pictures. It’s not a tree, it’s a dead branch. I can’t wait for our garbage men to laugh at us.

Chocolate Cake with fresh whipped cream

Two posts in a row for Miss Faith! It was her birthday early December, but since she was away we had to post-pone celebrating until last week. I ended up making the same cake twice in one week. Faith is more of a decadent chocolate person rather then cakes in funny shapes. So I used Smitten Kitchen’s amazing chocolate cake recipe. The coffee really enhanced the flavors. It didn’t need to bake as long as she suggested, also less baking made for a more fudgy taste.

The layers were so big that I sliced them in half to make a 4 layer cake. It was probably more then 4 ladies needed, but what’s life without indulgences? Inside was vanilla pudding, fresh strawberries and bananas. I made fresh whipped cream and did not add much sugar at all to the mixture. There was so much beauty in the chocolate cake and fruits that sweet icing would have taken away from all that. Faith seemed to enjoy it very much which of course makes me a happy duck.

I had so much buttermilk left and it’s one of those odd items that you only use for one purpose. Therefore I decided to make a cake for a small UFC gathering this past Saturday. Mike and Jenn (sibling and beau) managed to snag a piece of Faith’s cake and loved it, so they requested the same thing. The only thing is that strawberries are not in season so they are scarce and expensive. So this one was sans berries.

I made it festive for Saturday and rooting for my favorite fighter of the night – Forrest Griffin. Oh, by the way, did you know that his name is spelled ‘Forrest’ with 2 R’s (I didn’t!). Did anyone watch the fights? My absolute favorite moment was Cheick Kongo and Mr. Turk got into a battle of the groin kicks. Hilarity! I should make a French dessert for the GSP fight next month. I did always want to try macarons even though those are so not aggressive cookies.