Taking the Cake

I needed to make Alex Browning a birthday cake. She had mentioned chocolate when I asked her what kind of cake she'd like, and the recipe I settled on seemed to accommodate that request pretty well. It is, after all, called Chocolate Eruption Cake.

This cake was so intense, it was actually a two day process. Day one consisted of making a pan of the most dense brownie recipes you can find, lots of sugar and butter, the way it's really done. You're probably thinking, "But Molly, you're making a cheesecake! Why would you make brownies?" Well, dear reader, the answer is quite simple. A regular graham cracker crust just isn't enough for the most epic cheesecake known to mankind. Instead, one is obviously expected to use brownies. Oh yes, and because you will obviously have far too many brownies to include them all in the crust, you should probably put them in the actually batter, too. But we'll get to that part later :D.

So day two I actually cut the brownies up and assembled them in my brownie pan...



Of course, to compliment such a rich crust naturally one would prepare a ridiculously rich batter. And lots of it. This recipe called for a whopping 2 1/2 pounds of cream cheese, I did a double take when I read the recipe. For those of you who don't know how much cream cheese that actually it is, think five packages:



Some of you are now probably thinking, "Well that's all great, but for a Chocolate Eruption Cheesecake, this really doesn't have that much chocolate." Oh but just you wait! After I actually turned that cream cheese into a batter with a few eggs, some sweetened condensed milk, and whipping cream, I took about 1/3 of that batter and added 1 1/2 cups white chocolate chips and poured it over that delicious looking brownie crust. The other 2/3 of batter had even better things in store. To that I added: 1 cup chocolate chips, 2 cups chopped snickers bars, and almost 2 cups chopped brownie chunks. Before being stirred in, it looked like this...


You can't even see the chocolate chips! Clearly this picture doesn't do it justice.

So 1/2 that batter was poured on top of the layers I already had going. Why just 1/2 you make ask? Because I drizzled 1/4 a cup of caramel topping in between that chocolate filled batter that's why! And of course dolloped another 1/4 c on after I'd added the last of the cheesecake batter. By epic I mean really really epic. Especially since after the cake came out of the oven I drizzled 1/4 cup EACH of melted white, milk, and semisweet chocolate chips on top. Oh yes.



Since it was a birthday cake I decided to actually declare it a birthday cake by adding a little birthday sign. HAPPY BIRTHDAY ALEX!!!



This cheesecake, which I was fortunate enough to snag a couple slivers of over the course of the following week, was beyond delicious. It's so moist and chocolaty, the perfect indulgence. Even though it's time consuming and definitely calorie-wise an "X-rated" dessert according to the book it came from, I whole-heartedly recommend it, especially for special occasions. If you've got the time/spirit to give it a go I'd love to share the recipe, just hit me up!

I Like Throwing Shit in a Bowl!

Taylor named this post, and I let him do so because he was kind enough to assist me in this kitchen-based endeavor :D My Japanese teacher asked me to bake for a going away party we're having tomorrow for our student teacher and, of course, I was all too happy too oblige. Although I had settled on a delicious looking classic yellow layer cake with chocolate buttercream frosting (sounds good right?) I decided cookies would be easier and cleaner to pass out amongst classmates and opted for another intriguing recipe.

I once had a caramel apple from the Rocky Mountain Candy Co in Edinburgh called a "Kitchen Sink Caramel Apple." It was a huge granny smith dipped in caramel and then rolled in various toppings: m&ms, chocolate chips, graham cracker crumbs, and nuts, and then drizzled with three different types of chocolate. Orgasmic. The basic idea of things titled "Kitchen Sink" is that they include everything you have lying around or, everything but the kitchen sink. This was a concept I fell in love with because Taylor is all too right, I do love throwing a bunch of shit in a bowl! So I found a recipe called Kitchen Sink Cookies in that fabulous cookbook he gave me for Christmas and figured they'd be delicious. I haven't had one yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm right :).





Now Taylor's going to talk to you, since he was an integral part of this baking process! Hello! This is Taylor. I am a boy so Molly makes me do all the manly things involved in cooking like stirring, lifting heavy things, and providing moral support when things get too difficult and she starts to cry. Anyway! This recipe was particularly intriguing for a variety of reasons. The first reason being that it contained a LOT of oats. Last I checked, oats were the favorite food of horses, not people. Oh well, Molly has a tendency to eat lots of things popular amongst the lower echelons of the animal kingdom. Like flax seeds. I don't even know what those are! With that aside, I will continue my discussion of why this was a rather interesting recipe: Molly made way too many cookies. Remember that post from a while back when she made muffins and filled that bowl all the way up with batter? Yeah, that happened again, only this time there were oats and rice krispies everywhere. It was borderline horrifying, but we survived. Stirring that bowl was a super pain in the ass though. My arms hurt, but I don't care because I am MANLY! After my duties were completed I proceeded to sit around and do nothing while Molly scooped and baked the cookies nine at a time. Nearly seventeen hours later I estimate that she baked roughly fourteen thousand cookies. Good thing one of my other manly duties is eating more food than should normally be feasible. So the cookies are out of the oven and smelling delicious as most of the things Molly makes do. Except when she uses lentils. Or chick peas. Those smell like feet and burnt cats, respectively. So that's that! We made some kick-ass sink-shit cookies which smell pretty awesome and are composed primarily of chocolate and horse snacks. Until next time, au revoir blog readers.

Neighhhhh,
Taylor (And Molly!)



This picture doesn't even include the bag Taylor took home!

Make, Bake, and Break!

So I wanted to leave the house early tomorrow morning. In her rant about how ridiculous it was for me to be getting out of bed my mother made the mistake of saying I could leaving after making my father breakfast. Hmmm.... Really.

I think my mother assumed my dad had to be awake for me to make him breakfast, which is not the case at all! Screw eggs, bacon, pancakes, french toast, waffles, or whatnot! Muffins, breakfast breads, coffee cakes and one of my dad's favorites, scones, are all super make ahead breakfasts. So it is now 1:30 in the morning and I just finished preparing cranberry and pecan scones. All I have to do is pop them in the oven for about 15 minutes in the morning and they will be ready to eat without me even being here!











Admittedly, there's no way I'd get away with sneaking out of here as early as I'd like, but this at least will put me a bit ahead! It's too easy to outsmart my mother... can't wait to see how they turn out in the morning and, more importantly, her face when she realizes she's raised a smart ass. Actually, more like is reminded she raised a smart ass.

*When making scones always make sure your butter is SUPER COLD. Unlike frostings, cake batters, and bar batters, you want the butter in scone dough to form small chuncks (aim for about the size of peas). When the butter pieces melt in the oven they release air that forms little pockets in the pastries, this causes the flakiness that makes them so delicious. Room temperature or melted butter with taking the puff out of your breakfast scones, making them more cake like than the true product is meant to be.

**The recipe I used actually was for blueberry blackberry scones, but I didn't have the berries on hand so I just used what was in the cupboard. For most scone, cookie, and muffin recipes, add-ins can be traded for other add-ins according to your tastes or available supplies. Consider things like dried fruits, baking chips, and nuts interchangeable and have fun experimenting with different combinations of flavors!






These are pictures that I took earlier this morning of the finished scones (seeing as it's now Sunday) which turned out absolutely delicious. They browned wonderfully on the outside but were still soft in the middle, perfect breakfast material. That's my dad enjoying one, he was a pretty happy camper. By the way, the scone plan got me out of the house a whole 90 minutes prior to my previously dictated departure time!

Happy Baking!

Getting Rid of My Muffin Top

I have had a revelation and I'd like to share it with the world. Muffin tops really aren't attractive. And I don't mean the ones hanging over the majority of American jeans. Muffins are good, but messy and honestly, more trouble than they're worth. It's nearly impossible to get batter in those little cupcake wrappers without splattering it all over the pan and you know what else? The whole thing is the edge!

Have you seen the brownie pan someone invented so that the whole thing is an "edge?" Who in their right might would ever choose to eat the edge of a brownie, let alone make a whole batch of brownies that contain multiple edges, is a fool in my book. I like sweets (brownies, cookies, cake, pie, you name it) soft, dense and chewy. And that is not what a muffin is.

As I've mentioned before, Taylor gave me a wonderful baking book for Christmas that I absolutely adore. I whipped it out the other day to make a tried and true batch of blueberry muffins that are absolutely delicious and, when reading the side notes, was given a suggestion that I think I will take from now on. Instead of baking my muffin batter in muffin tins, I roughly doubled the baking time and poured it all into loaf pans. That's right! No more blueberry muffins, but instead deliciously dense, moist, blueberry muffin bread! It's SO GOOD. It's like taking the concept of banana bread and making it ANY KING OF BREAD. Why did it take so long?

What might be more amusing than my new tactics, however, is the brief lapse in intelligence that I experienced while making these lovely loafs. I decided to double a recipe that I really just didn't have any business doubling.







Yes, that's how deep my biggest mixing bowl is. And this is how far I ended up filling it...





Not my brightest moment... I attracted the attention of both my parents, who I tried to hide the batter from as I added ingredients and volume. Inevitably, my mother noticed my blueberry muffin batter, slowly developing an impressive resemblance to the Blob of the old horror films, and was so engrossed she insisted on taking a picture of me trying desperately to stir it. It is not easy to mix lots of batter in a less than accommodating bowl.





I managed though, and ended up with roughly 24 delicious muffins (yes, I did resort to baking some in the tins) and three well sized loafs of blueberry muffin bread. I gave a little away, but our family easily polished off the goods within a mere days, I'd say it was a success.

Immerse Yourself in Good Food

I'm not much of a gadget person, I don't really own that many electronics mostly because I really don't have much of a use or general desire for them. My cell phone and iPod are really the only ones I consider a necessity, and my laptop is just a huge convenience :D. I may have to get a little more interested in gadgets though... because there are so many out there for cooking!

So I'm sitting on my bed, pajamas on, surfing the internet and just hanging out, when Taylor sent me a woot link. When I opened it up my mouth dropped and my heart starting beating at an alarming rate. Me: "OOOOOOOOH, I don't know if I should get! It'ssoprettyIshouldn'tspendmoneybuti'vewantedoneit'sawesomeiloveshouldigetitohno...." Taylor: "It's usually twice that price. You should get." Me: "shouldigetitidon'tknowshouldn'tspendmoneyit'ssocoollookatit!" Taylor: "It's not that much, just get it, it's worth it." This went on for a while, but I did end up getting it. It being an immerision blender.

I'd seen an immersion blender before, on the Food Network or some kind of show like that. In case you don't know what they are, mine looks like this...





The concept is that you you can blend things without putting them in either a blender or food processor. BRILLIANT! The only thing I've seen them used for, and really the only thing I can think of using them for, is soups. So naturally I immediately went in search of a soup recipe, and came up with... um... actually i don't even remember what's it was called. I have to admit I made this soup almost 4 weeks ago. I've been too busy and/or lazy to actually get my latest creations up on my blog page, so this one has been waiting patiently for it's "debut." I guess I made it wait a little too long. I think it was leek and asparagus soup. It had a few other ingredients, but those two were the focus, and honestly it wasn't even really that great, the best part was using my incredibly awesome new hand held blender!!!

Just to give you an idea of the wonder of this thing, I took a before picture...







and an after!







Isn't the blendedness beautiful? And I didn't even have to put together or clean up a food processor. Oh yes. The best part is that not only does it have these amazing blending powers... but it also came with a bunch of other attachments, most of which I haven't had time to explore yet. Taylor and I did test out the whipping attachment, which made a lovely meringue, but I definitely have a lot to learn.

Rolling in the Dough

Sometimes I feel like my life revolves around merely shuffling from one event to the next. I was rushing through the hallway today trying to get to my car fast enough to get to CosmoProf fast enough that I could get to the Monon Center fast enough to lift and run before going to a short class. I'm not going to lie, I kinda like routine, at least to a certain degree. I like knowing what I'm going to be doing in advance and planning accordingly and if that sounds boring then so be it. But, routine or no routine, life just isn't life without a little spontaneity. Thanks to not having a car for more than two months, my ability to be spontaneous has been sucked dry. Sucks.

What I do have to fall back on that breaks up the fast paced nature of life these days is the occasional blessing of some time to cook. I enjoy being in the kitchen, obviously, I think I've said that about a hundred dozen times, but I don't like cooking when I'm rushed. Being on a time crunch takes the love out of cooking and replaces it, at least for me, with overwhelming waves of stress. The other day I made some soup that I failed to take any pictures of and therefore neglected to blog about. But I had about a hundred other things to do that evening and had expected the stupid soup to take about half as long as it did so by midway through that the only reason I cared to finish was so I would have something to eat. Dad was out of town, which Mom declared to mean a cooking vacation for herself.

For this reason I try to avoid cooking or baking unless I know I'll have about twice as much time as I think I'll need to complete my endeavor. There are some foods you just can't rush, or it takes all the love out of it, and the love is what makes it worth while. One of my absolute favorite things to make is a baked good component you simply cannot hurry through. Pie crust!

What makes pie crust so unbelievably wonderful? It's so simple, yet at the same time so complex. The one that I made, that I highly recommend, is only flour, a little sugar, a little salt, and water. But it's so perfect! The recipe is so easy, too, but at the same time a little complicated. You have to be willing to take the time to make it perfect, which takes only about 15 minutes if you don't try and rush it, and you have to get the hang of a pastry blender which is only a minor detail... cutting butter can be a bit of guesswork if you don't know what you're doing, but I have faith in all of you.





All pie crusts lead to something else, though. Serving just pie crust is a little odd. So mine lead to Dutch Apple Pie, or I guess Dutch Apple Pie is really what caused me to make pie crust, which I chose as a thank you gift for someone in particular and ended up making not once... not twice... but three times. For Taylor's dad, for my family, and for a neighbor. I'm not a huge fan of apple pie, so maybe that's why this didn't make my list of favorites. Personally, no chocolate, no peanut butter, no fun really, but I like to appease others more than myself and it's Lent so I decided to give this one a shot.

Overall I'd say it was a success, everybody who had some seemed to enjoy it. I did run into a couple problems along the way though... First off, did you know pie crust can "shrink?" Me neither. Every time, never fail, the pie crust retreated into the pan at least a little bit, crushing my hopes of a gorgeously browned trim around the edges of my cinnamon crumble creations. Taylor and I did use one of the many pie crusts I kneaded out over the course of the past week to make a lemon meringue pie (unfortunately no photos were snapped) and I tried folding the dough OVER the edges of the pan and that helped a little... but only a little. I think the key, though, is the fresher the dough, the better it bakes. The recipe I used said it would keep in the fridge for up to a week, but I would try to make it the day of if at all possible.

There is No Love in a BigMac

Another recipe and photo free post. Sorry, I've discovered that this is not only an opportunity to share cooking experiences, but a great place to vent. So read or don't read, these are my thoughts on fast food.

Entrepreneurship class is a waste of my time, at least 99.99% of the time. Today, even though the movie we watched had very little educational value (no matter how relevant Mr. Clayton insists it is) I was actually, for once, interested. When the video started I was less than surprised to see Ray Kroc was the focus, one of the greatest entrepreneurs of modern times, and certainly one of the most influential men in the history of the food industry.

I'm not a fan of McDonald's restaurants, really not a fan of fast food in general, and Ray Kroc gave me one more reason to dislike them. I don't enjoy eating at fast food places because I feel like I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I know it's not good for me, I generally perceive everything about them to be rather dirty, and the fact that the food is so cheaply made makes me wonder if it's really, well, even food at all. I'm not a complete heath nut, but I'm conscious enough that Hardy's, Wendy's, White Castle, Taco Bell, Burger King, and so on just don't make my nutritional cut. I can't complete dismiss these establishments on the basis of their actual food, however. I will admit, some of it does taste decently good and they certainly have their place in today's world. More than anything though I dislike the concept on which fast food restaurants were founded and now continue to flourish.

I wouldn't even consider the McDonald brothers, who actually opened the original McDonald's in California, any type of chefs. They first started a movie theater in an attempt to make their fortune in the business world, and only decided to start a restaurant after observing the success of a hotdog stand on a nearby corner. The two opened their own hotdog stand that eventually evolved into a drive-up restaurant complete with carhops. The motivation behind the establishment, revenue. And that's exactly what Ray Kroc, pure salesman, had in mind when he became involved with the McDonald brothers.

Ray Kroc was undeniably a business genius. The globalization of McDonald's was initiated by his nation wide franchising campaign. Without him, McDonald's would have remained a single self-service burger joint in California. So what's my issue? What do I have against a self-made billionaire, and even most other fast food corporations?

Their food isn't about anything more than expansion. Than industry advancement. Than revenue. The idea at the core of any fast food restaurant is increasing speed and efficiency, minimizing cost, and maximizing profit. There is no love in the billions of hamburgers sold by McDonald's, their is only the motivation to make money. McDonald's is the way it is because they've found a way to capitalize on the vulnerable appetites of the ever fatter American population, and have no problem doing so. In the case of McDonald's, and really all it's competitors, it is quantity over quality. Who cares what's in the food as long as people are guzzling them down fast enough to fill a paycheck?

For those of those who loves McDonald's I suppose this really is of no concern. If you like the food who cares what the people making it think? I guess, with a real love for good wholesome food, my viewpoint is a little different. I hate to think so many capitalize on food without really haven't any respect for it, or for the people eating it. As I've said, and continue to believe, food is about love. There is no love in a BigMac.