Wednesday, September 22, 2010

"I'm such a good baker... the teaching is incidental"

Ok, so blogging apparently isn't my thing.  But this was so exciting that I had to write about it!!

I made fortune cookies!!  Specifically, German Narrative Past themed fortune cookies!  Since I am TA-ing a German class, sometimes I need to think of creative ways for students to interact with the language... so why not in a cookie????

I think it was some weird Facebook quiz or application or something that appeared on my Newsfeed that originally inspired me to make fortune cookies in the first place.  However the inspiration came, it wasn't long before I discovered that making fortune cookies is more complicated than I was expecting and people have VERY different ideas about how to do it.

I need everything to be perfect, right?  So I obviously felt the need to watch every single video about fortune cookies that youtube had.  Well, maybe not every single one, but I at least watched these:

Howcast's How To Make Fortune Cookies
Country Living's How to Make Fortune Cookies
Paula Deen's Homemade Fortune Cookies

and another video in which they made the cookies on the stove instead of in the oven, but I looked through my web browser history and I can't find it....

Then I had to find recipes... since for some reason I didn't want to just follow the recipes provided so conveniently in the videos.  This wasn't really as complicated since I just went to my go-to source: allrecipes.com

I compared these two recipes:
Fortune Cookies So Easy
Fortune Cookies I

From all of this research I created a recipe that looked very much like the Fortune Cookies So Easy recipe and followed the instructions in the Country Living's How to Make Fortune Cookies video.

The recipe I altered a little bit so that it only had 1 tbsp of water and I included about 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and 1/2 tsp of allspice.  I'm calling them Pumpkin Spice Fortune Cookies!

I choose to follow the Country Living video instructions because their fortune cookies actually looked like fortune cookies.... not like folded dough... This is what my fortune cookies looked like:

They are pretty awesome!  It is very exciting.


My suggestions:
  1. Actually get some cotton gloves.  These bitches are freakin' hot. 
  2. Include some kind of interesting flavor.  I mean, you are making them yourself, they should be more interesting than fortune cookies that chinese restaurants hand out.
  3. I don't know how important this is yet, but a friend said that her fortunes stuck to the cookies, so I buttered my fortunes.
  4. In this vein, print out your fortunes with a laser printer, the butter didn't smear the lettering!
  5. I think that if you let the cookies cook until there is about 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch of golden brown color around the edges, they are about perfect for folding into cookies.  Just be super quick while you are doing it!  They harden so fast!
  6. Make this recipe! It is super fun :)

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Ultimate Cakespeare

No, I'm sorry, this does not involve throwing cake far distances at people, animals or inanimate objects.
This is a much more exciting kind of Cakespeare! The kind in the image of William Shakespeare's face!
This past week theatre-lovers and Shakespeare-fanatics alike celebrated the birthday of the prolific and talented Bard.  At the University of Delaware, the group E-52 Student Theatre has a day long celebration of his birth called "24 Hours of Shakespeare", during which Shakespeare's many plays and sonnets are read the entire day!  This year, in honor of this pastime, I made a fairly epic cake.
Now, I am often one to belittle sheet cake as seeming too simple; however, I have rethought my opinion and have decided that sheet cake can be very nearly as complicated as any other decorated cake if you are not just covering it in frosting and tiny icing roses. (Although, I don't actually know how to make icing roses yet, so maybe I shouldn't knock it till I try it...)
For this particular cake, I actually used two different sheet cakes.  One was a Butter Pound Cake.  Seriously, this was delicious.  Buttery and dense and amazing.  I found the recipe on allrecipes.com and I certainly would use it again, but I wouldn't mind seeing if I could tweak it a bit.

Butter Pound Cake
  • 1 cup butter
  • 6 eggs
  • 3 cups white sugar
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 pint heavy whipping cream (This is what the recipe called for, but I actually used 1 1/2 cups whipping cream and a 1/2 cup of half & half, this worked just fine and probably reduced the calorie count by about... 12 calories or so)
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 2 teaspoons lemon extract
The recipe wanted me to make it in a tube pan, but I figured as long as I watched it in the sheet pan, I'd be fine (this was true).  Something that the recipe does not call for, that I did, was the beating of the egg whites.  I have really started making this a habit because I have noticed that the cakes really do seem more fluffy and delicious because of it... or at the very least, the cake batters do (which is really just as important because the people hanging around while you make cake will always be more excited about your finished product if the "taste tests" they get along the way are fantastic).  
I also made a Chocolate Butter Cake.  Despite the word butter in the name, this cake is surprisingly light (or at least it is light for a chocolate cake).  This recipe came from joyofbaking.com a while ago.  I have been using the recipe successfully for quite some time.
Chocolate Butter Cake
4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch-processed)
1 cup boiling water
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
2 cups granulated white sugar
3 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 cup milk
I did this for both sides of the cake until it looked like this:

Monday, March 8, 2010

If a bakery were actually a bar, part II

Sometimes, cupcakes are incredibly boring.  Vanilla. Chocolate. Vanilla with Chocolate frosting... even the revered Red Velvet.  They are all boring.  Everyone has eaten a Chocolate Cupcake (also, sometimes I find it odd that I capitalize cupcake flavors... I think that is important though).  Chocolate Cupcakes are never novel.  They can be delicious.  But they are never novel.  The point here is that novelty is exciting and weird, but something that one should always strive for... otherwise, they might as well just make the same boring Chocolate Cupcake with boring Vanilla Buttercream Frosting that everyone has made since cake was invented and they discovered that chocolate is actually freaking awesome... This is not to say that I don't love Chocolate Cupcakes, because I do, but I digress...
Recently, I had the inspiration to create cupcakes that were alcohol themed.  They didn't have to have alcohol in them, but this one did.  I made Guinness Cupcakes.  That's right all you crazy Irish people and all you crazy people who are just Irish on March 17th, Guinness Cupcakes.  Don't get too excited yet though.  They mostly just tasted like chocolate, which is actually pretty awesome for me because (blasphemy) I don't actually like Guinness; however, it is less awesome for my concept.
These cupcakes were a variation on my Root Beer Float Cupcakes, but I used Guinness instead of Root Beer.  The flavor wasn't that strong and for the most part the Guinness showed up in a vaguely yeasty flavor that made it more reminiscent of soft chocolaty bread, than a cupcake.
I am not going to give up yet though!  I am going to try variations of this recipe in the future and see if I can capture that Guinnessy flavor that seems to be loved by so many.
 You may ask yourselves, why would this crazy person who is obviously too obsessed with cupcakes for her own good want to make a cupcake taste like something that she doesn't like?  Good question.  I actually don't know, obviously I am insane.


You may also ask yourselves, why does that Guinness Cupcake look like the most absolutely delicious thing you have ever seen?  Also a good question.  I can answer this one: it is because it is covered in chocolate ganache and chocolate covered pretzels... two of the things that God created immediately after turning the lights on, because even God needs chocolate.




Basically, as soon as I get the flavor down for these Guinness Cupcakes, they will be the best thing to happen on St. Patrick's Day since the invention of the keg. srsly.









Saturday, February 27, 2010

Stiching and Bitching and Baking

When you are in college and you live within walking distance of all your friends, life is amazingly simple; however, when you don't live close enough to see your friends every single day, sometimes you need to make excuses to see them.  My favorite excuse is a party for which I bake obscene amounts of food. I discovered rather quickly that a good way to get people to want to come to your parties is by making sure that they want to eat everything that you ever make because it tastes amazing.... it seems like a pretty good rule to live by.
My sister, also being a culinary genius in her own right, and I went a little overboard with this party...

She made amazing baklava!  It was incredibly delicious and I continuously had to make sure that she was getting the credit she deserved for such a wonderful creation :-)
 
(It isn't the best picture... but the lighting in my house is kinda lame...)

I made Lemon Ricotta Cookies (which were very interesting and soft), Italian Cream Cupcakes and an Italian Cream Cake in the shape of a fish... I love that fish pan.



The other exciting thing that I made was Root Beer Float Cupcakes!
 
(This also isn't a very good picture... I should have moved the ketchup bottle...lols)
I had tried another Root Beer Cupcake recipe before, and personally, while other people thought it was ok, I didn't like it as much as I had hoped I would... The cupcakes were overly moist and they didn't taste like Root Beer.  I wanted to try again, so I altered a recipe that called for Root Beer Schnapps and Root Beer by just using Root Beer and Artificial Root Beer flavoring.
Here was the original recipe, I found it here: Root Beer Float Cupcakes
1 cup root beer schnapps
1 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (like A&W or Dads)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

This is how I altered it:
 2 1/2 cups old-fashioned style root beer (I used IBC because I felt like buying something in glass bottles)
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tbsp. root beer flavoring
2 cups dark brown sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1 Tbs. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt  (I actually forgot the salt, and they were ok, but I would recommend not forgetting the salt if you made them...)

 

If you went to the site where I found the recipe, you will notice that my cupcakes do not look like their cupcakes... this is because I wanted to go for a more Root Beer Float feel with a thick dollop of vanilla whipped cream frosting on top.
For the whipped cream frosting, all I did was beat some heavy cream, vanilla extract, and a little bit of powdered sugar... I don't like my whipped cream frosting to be very sweet.
The most exciting part of these cupcakes, however, was the fizz!!!  I had decided that I felt the carbonation in a Root Beer Float was really important.  In order to duplicate that, I cut the tops off of the cupcakes, filled them up with pop rocks, put the tops back on, and covered them with frosting.  It is probably better to do this after the cupcakes have been sitting out for just a little while and have lost a bit of moisture... the pop rocks don't pop as much then before you put them in your mouth.

 
These were fairly awesome :-)  I would definitely make them again. Also, in case anyone was wondering, they did legitimately taste like Root Beer, and the Cherry Pop Rocks blended quite nicely with the flavor... I think Cherry would probably work best.

Monday, February 8, 2010

If a bakery were actually a bar...

One night, I woke up from a very odd dream  In this dream, I was making a cake that was very tall and was shaped like a heart.  This wasn't odd.  What was odd was the fact that I had subconsciously decided to frost this cake with strawberry frosting on the inside of the cake and mint frosting on the outside of the cake.  I hadn't ever thought of this combination before.  But, fortunately, this idea stuck with me.
Several days later, I discovered the perfect cake to complement my strawberry and mint frostings.  Lime cake.  The fact that this didn't come to me earlier is a bit appaling since my favorite fruity feminine drink is a Strawberry Mojito.

The lime cake recipe I used turned out very moist and delicious!  It used buttermilk, which I think complemented the flavor very nicely.  The recipe also called for lime zest, but I didn't have a zester, so I just chopped up tiny pieces of lime peel and it still turned out wonderful.  I also made mini-cupcakes instead of regular sized cupcakes.  I think this really concentrated the flavor and made each bite of cupcake taste that much better.
The frostings were definitely what I focused on since they were literally the "stuff of dreams" and they were fantastic!  The mint frosting was really easy.  I made a buttercream frosting to which I added a bit of mint extract and a tiny bit of food coloring.  The strawberry frosting wasn't as easy.  I wanted to use fresh strawberries.  And I did.  But the strawberry puree was a little too runny and I didn't get it to a frosting-like consistency; however, it was very much like a strawberry butter and it was quite tasty as it was.
In order to get the cupcakes you see here, I cut the tops off the cupcakes and put about a teaspoon and a half of the strawberry butter on the bottom half of the cupcake then replaced the cupcake top.  On top of each cupcake, I piped some mint frosting then topped the each with a quarter of a strawberry and a mint leaf.

I don't think that it is immodest to say that these cupcakes were probably one of the most delicious things I have ever eaten, let alone created.  If I were to make these cupcakes again though, I might try to see if I can draw more inspiration from the actual cocktail and add some rum.  Or maybe I'll just eat it with a shot on the side.