Millionaire's Shortbread pg 124

I've seen this recipe floating around the internet for some time now and people seem to love it so I thought that it would be a good choice. I think I tried to make it before with dismal results but it may have been the same concept but a different recipe.

The Verdict: It takes time and patience but with some tweaking, it could be amazing. Someone compared it to a twix which blew my mind because I didn't make the connection myself. Shortbread, caramel, chocolate .. twix. The dark chocolate ganache was a nice choice, not too sweet but a good balance for the bar. I did think that the bar was missing a salty element though. Maybe some salt would be a nice addition to the shortbread.

Tips for Next Time: The shortbread was fine on it's own, a little thick but a good solid surface for the tastiness piled on top. The caramel was HORRIBLE to make. The recipe suggests two methods, 12 minutes in the microwave or 1 1/2 hours on the stove top. Obvious decision, I went for the microwave. It says to whisk every 2 minutes but between minute 8-10 when I walked away, it erupted and I was left with a molten sugar mess in my microwave. I transferred what I had left into a pot and tried to finish it on the stovetop but not even 2 minutes into it I was whisking and with each movement I was dragging burnt bits through the caramel. Thinking quick on my feet I grabbed a strainer and quickly strained out as much as the brunt crap as I could (hence the dark specs). Was anyone the wiser? No, but making that fetching caramel was stressful! Next time I'm finding my own caramel recipe.

chocolate chip cookies and peanut butter cookies pg 139-140

I had flagged the cookies as my next recipes to try and made sure that I had all the ingredients but I made the fatal error of not reading through the instructions first. Turns out that the chocolate chip cookies needed to rest for 6 hours and the peanut butter for 3. I like to bake because the reward is also instantaneous. It takes me 2o minutes to mix something up, I get it in the oven and then I get a tasty treat when it's done baking. Ta da! I don't want to wait 6 hours for cookies! But alas, I'm following the instructions exactly as written so I mixed up all the dough on Saturday night and baked them all on Sunday. Let me just tell you that there is nothing worse than scooping cold cookie dough except for scooping cold cookie dough with giant chunks of cold chocolate. I decided that I hated these cookies before I even had the chance to taste one.

The Verdict: With the waiting period and the cold dough scooping - I really really wanted to hate these cookies but they cannot be denied. They are tasty. Super tasty even. Even though I want to bake the recipes exactly as written, I couldn't help myself and in the chocolate chip cookies I added 2 cups of semi sweet and 3/4 cup of milk chocolate, I just love the mixture of two chocolates in one bite. The chocolate chip aren't the prettiest and there are 2 sticks of butter in each recipe but dammit, I loved these cookies.

Tips for Next Time: They're pretty solid cookies as-is. Aside from my mixing of 2 kinds of chocolate chips, I wouldn't change a thing. I had enough foresight to add some milk chocolate to half the peanut butter cookies so my husband couldn't eat the entire batch, he was annoyed but his coworkers seemed to enjoy the little addition.

whiteout cake pg 55

My husband doesn't eat chocolate and while we were hanging around on Christmas break I wanted to make something that he could enjoy too so for my very first Baked recipe, I picked the Whiteout Cake. I didn't realize how much batter it makes so I ended up with a 4", 6" and 10" cake. When my husband saw them on top of the oven cooling he asked if I was making a wedding cake. Note to self; it's totally ok to scale down.

Verdict: Not my favorite. I made it exactly to recipe for some friends we were having over for boardgames and our friends loved it but I thought that it was waaaay too sweet. I'm over critical but I while the cake was light and airy, it was also dry. And the white chocolate frosting was like whipped pastry cream, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The frosting is made with flour and boy could I tell in the final product. Plus, you cook the flour, sugar, cream and milk before adding all the butter and whatnot and even with constant stirring, I ended up with bits of cooked flour, very unsightly. Also, the next day the leftover frosting I had in the fridge had separated which I was able to remedy but it was annoying nonetheless.

Tips for next time: Pass it up all together. There are better options out there.

this little project of mine

I'm feeling slightly guilty because the husband is in the basement doing a horribly dirty task that I can't help on so I figured that my time would be best spent on a task that I haven't been terribly excited about either - updating! It's not that I don't enjoy you, dear blog, it just seems to take so much time to write posts and upload photos when I could be.. you know..napping. But! I have an exciting new project.

Since I'm not baking professionally anymore, I had this crazy idea that in order to keep my skills up to par that it could be fun to bake an entire cookbook, front to back. Fun! I shared this idea with my family for a possible christmas gift idea and ..well.. I got 3 cookbooks. I received both Baked books and Flour. As I carefully looked through each recipe I was more inspired and excited about Flour but it is a lot more technical and requires some hard to find ingredients so I decided that for my first cover to cover experience to go the simpler route, Baked. To you know, get my feet wet and to get an idea of what I've committed myself to.

I've also committed to being better about taking decent photos since I've gotten lazy lately with only taking phone photos. And so, this tiny blog of mine will be chronicling my crazy adventure through Baked. I'm already apologizing to my coworkers for ruining their New Years resolutions so quickly.

mmmm brownies

Why: I don’t know why I do it to myself, but every week I check out the kithn to see what they have going on. Recently they featured these, mascarpone brownies. I’m always sniffing out new and improved brownie recipes so I had to give these a try.

What: Aside from the slight taste in tirimusu – I’ve never had mascarpone. And, I didn’t know where to find it. Luckily I found it at the 3rd grocery store I looked, and for a reasonable price (although I know Costco has it from time to time but really, who needs that much?). I read the reviews and after a few comments said that they couldn’t taste the cheese, I knew I was safe. I also saw that the actual brownie wasn’t that sweet so I added an extra 2 tbsp of sugar. Ganache is one of my favorite things, so easy to make and yet everyone is impressed. I hate frosted brownies – why mess with a good thing. Whenever a frosted brownie ends up on my plate I usually scrape off all the frosting. In the case of these brownies, the ganache is definitely appropriate and needed. With the dense texture and tons-o-chocolate it’s a rich dessert so a little goes a long way. So, the big question; are they worth it? While they are super tasty, the calorie intake is questionable but the process is no more complicated than any other brownie recipe out there. I have half a tub of mascarpone left so, yes, I will be making these again. After that, I’m curious to substitute cream cheese.

baby turns 1..1...1...

Why: My niece was turning 1 and my sister asked me to make her a cake. She let me have free reign except no chocolate, oh and cupcakes would be nice for the kids, and the raspberry I did previously was tasty.. and it would be fun if it was the count from sesame street or shaped like their dog .. but you know, free reign. I actually really appreciated the directions she subtly provided. Complete free reign is hard because there are too many tasty possibilities out there that it's overwhelming. I have to admit that I am so proud of the outcome. I was hesitant because of all the black coloring but in the end I was super happy with the outcome.

What: The cake is a simple yellow cake. So simple that I ended up baking 3 separate cakes. I have a standby cookbook that I LOVE but their yellow cake was so incredibly eggy and chewy that I thought that I messed something up so I made it again. With the same chewy egg results I had a ...moment... of frustration and moved on to a different recipe. I used this recipe, mostly because of the pictures and how it was claimed to be the best. You might be wondering "well, was it the best?" and I will have to say, nay. It was actually pretty bad. I had tons of batter left over so I made cupcakes along with the cake round and when I tasted the cupcake it literally tasted like corn bread without the corn meal. The texture was great but it wasn't sweet at all. I refused to bake ANOTHER cake so I added more sugar to the cupcakes I had yet to bake and figured that I'd make the most with the non sweet cake round that had just come out of the oven.

The filling is my usual buttercream but colored and flavored with raspberries. I also tossed in some fresh raspberries. For the outside of the cake I used some vanilla bean buttercream I had kicking around from a different cake (more to come on that awesomeness!). The fondant is the marshmallow fondant that is not only super easy to make and use but is also really tasty. It is near impossible to make black colored fondant (at best turns out dark grey) and I wasn't going to go buy black fondant to cover such a little bit of the cake. So, I used food coloring diluted with water. I then used qtips to lightly color in where I wanted. It was my first time using this technique and I was really surprised by how well it turned out.

I decorated the cake in about 2 1/2 hours and in the end I was really proud of myself. I forgot about the monocle until we were about to leave for the party so I just used plastic from one of my clam shell food containers. It turned out that there was so much sweetness from the raspberry buttercream, the vanilla buttercream and the fondant that the not overly sweet cake worked out perfect. The cake was a success, everyone loved it, especially the birthday girl. She wanted to put her feet in it which is how you know that she really likes something.

apple and baking, the perfect match

Oh food blog..it's been awhile. I hope that you didn't miss me too much. Truth is, the husband is back in school working on his degree and has been a complete computer hog with his online classes. I would occasionally snag the laptop to check out my favorite blogs or find some recipes but in general I wasn't spending much time on the computer. And then the stars aligned and I finally embraced technology. It started with the iphone. Long story short, my old phone took a water bath and stopped working and after much resistance on my part, I finally followed all the cool kids and got an iphone. I wanted to hate it, I really did, but the truth is that it's really amazing. I don't have to write down recipes anymore, I can just pull up the website on my phone! If we're out running errands and aren't sure if a store is open, we can check before we drive over and waste time. And the camera. My husband is in IT which means that he stores everything in a million folders on the computer so it's impossible to find what I'm looking for. And to be honest, he's made it so complicated that I don't know how to get the photos off our digital camera so I've been relying solely on my iphone for photos and it's been magical!

And then the second wave of embracing technology; I finally accepted the fact that we need a second computer. The husband had been pushing for an ipad but I need a keyboard, dangit! He found an apple refurbished macbook air for a steal and it was a perfect compromise. It's still incredible small and portable like an ipad (we got the 11 inch) but has the keyboard and was only a couple hundred more than the ipad so everyone wins. I think there was also an alternative motive because we've been acquiring A LOT of furniture that we plan to sell and it was suggested that we start a blog to help sell things but my perfect excuse was that I never had access to the computer to start and maintain yet another blog. I guess that my bluff has been called.

So I'm back! I've been baking like crazy and have been stock piling pictures. Now I just need to post it all. Thanks for hanging in there food blog. I'll try harder to treat you better.