What's the French Word for FAILURE?

I SUCK. I am NOT a baker. I may be DARING. But screw that baker part. I'm a cook goddammit. I hate that I allowed this challenge to f*ck with my head. I over psyched myself from the beginning. I got scared. Over what??? A few egg whites, some nuts and sugar?? WHAT THE FUCK? I watched an excellent video on how to make macs about eleventy gabillion times. I read that damn forum and looked at photos for the entire month. I read and REREAD the recipe a 100 times. But nothing helped me. I was doomed from the start. The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe. Ami, you know how smitten I am with you.. always have been, so please take no offense. But uhmm... Claudia? Claudia can bite my ass. I hated that recipe.. and it hated me back with a burning white heat of a 1000 suns. I didn't even take photos of it - and ya'll KNOW how much I love to embarrass myself. It was that bad. :( Yanno, this ain't my first rodeo. I made macs years ago with my Guru! The first time she came to visit. And although she did most of the work, she taught me well - she showed me the correct way to fold. She showed me how to grind the nuts and the sugar. But, that was a long time ago, and even if she hadn't done most of the work herself, if I had done it all.. I still would have been just as lost this time. It was just too long ago. But I was inspired by ya'll. Like I am every month. I knew the exact flavors I wanted to make and I was ready to DO THIS again. On the few days I was home on vacation, I woke saying "Today I make macarons!" And I knew which recipe I wanted to try next.. but then I'd find an excuse not to torture myself and I wouldn't make them. So, obviously, yesterday was my DO OR DIE day. Actually Sunday was, but I ended up taking an improptu nap. Hey, it was the last day of my vacation - DO NOT JUDGE ME. After a chat with my sister, Veronica.. who makes the dreamiest macarons, I felt like I could not only make her recipe, but end up with 48 perfect macaron shells. It was her video that I watched over and over again, her voice I listened to.. her technique I felt I could replicate. Yeah. No. Another failure, but by far, not as epic as the first try. I know exactly where I screwed up. I knew exactly when I screwed up. It's all about the f'n "magma". I overbeat this batter. Frankly, this batter had every right to report me to the authorities and take a bed at the nearest women's shelter. Seriously. My "magma" turned out more like a slightly thick version of muddy river water in like a nano-second. Oh it flowed alright.. but nothing, including several hundred bags of sand, was going to keep this stuff in place. I decided to look upon them as if they were "multi-tasking". After I piped several circles, I watched them splooge into each other. But at that point, after I wiped away a renegade tear from my cheek and then sucked down a few glugs of a bottle of Jack Daniels we keep in the house for guests.. I turned my back on my over beaten and abused macarons. I left them to splooge and "dry" at the same time. I threw up my hands and screamed "UNCLE" (but it was more like "YOU FAH-HAUL-AKIN IZEHOLES"). I fully expected to return in 40 minutes and find one giant rectangular mac, threatening to escape the sides of the jelly-roll pan it rested on. During that 40 minutes, I pondered how this could have happened. What amazes me is how many times I sucked in that video. I knew I was going to stop beating the batter at the exact right time (Magma time!) because I had watched the video so much that surely by osmosis alone, I would know when. OHMYGOD don't even get me started on the 2nd panic attack when my nuts wouldn't grind down small enough. I was so careful! I ground, I sifted, I ground some more, I sifted some more.. and I still ended up with 107 (ONE HUNDRED AND SEVEN) grams of almonds that were way too chunky. Finally, I called Veron back.. "what do I do??" I said between a hiccup and another slurp of my new best friend, Jack. She suggested I grind them in small batches in my coffee grinder. Bless her. That worked. I also ground down the Canadian Vanilla Maple tea I used to hopefully get a good maple flavor in the shells. I ground down what was already miniscule pieces parts of tea and natural and/or artifical flavors into powder, for crissakes!!! And the top of my wee coffee grinder has a hole in the plastic, so I had to keep the palm of my hand slammed down on it and regardless of how long I waited for the contents to settle back down, I still inhaled a tiny poof of powdered vanilla maple tea! That stuff could have been asbestos laden - but I took one for the team so my maple flavored macs with cream cheese and BACON filling would be THE BOMB. So as I'm replaying all of these extra steps I took to make sure my macs would come out beautifully.. it all came down to one stroke. One paddle of the pud too many. Over confidence at it's finest. I left my zen place and lost my concentration and that one extra stroke of my spatula turned all of my hard work into... muddy river water. And here is what I got for my efforts.. they've got feet alright. But barely breathe on one and you'll watch it implode. The first batch wasn't baked long enough, so they ended up being a huge mass of tissue thin crackly crust and ooey gooey innards that stuck to anything they touched. I now know what to do if I can't find the super glue when I need it. No running to the store, I'll just underbake a batch of macarons! You could build a bridge with that stuff! You'll also notice that apparently, I can pipe a perfect Thresher Shark, but cannot pipe a simple circle to save my life. The 2nd batch was a bit better.. I baked them for a few minutes longer and they popped right off the paper, but they were still really thin and the tops crack really easily.. like move your finger 1/16th of an inch over them and they crack. Oh and they don't taste of maple. Not in the slightest. They are just nutty and sweet. Just like their maker! If you can compare batshit crazy and grumpy to nutty and sweet, that is. :P So I decided to flavor the cream cheese with maple syrup instead of powdered sugar. At first taste there was no maple, but after it sat in the fridge for a while, the maple finally came through - thank the baby Jebus. I added crumbled applewood smoked bacon to the mixture, leaving some out for "garnish" - cuz we all know how fancy pants I am. Some I just lightly brushed with maple syrup and sprinkled some extra bacon on top.. some I left plain.. and some I rolled the edges in bacon. Those, I think, were my favorite. At least, that's the only one I've actually tried and AT THE VERY LEAST I was RIGHT ON with the flavor combo. The filling wasn't too sweet since the cream cheese leaves you with a nice tang. And the bacon.. well.. I dunno, kids.. roll a fresh cat turd in bacon, and call me to dinner. You just can't go wrong with crispedy bacon. So there ya have it.. another long ass story of yet another catastrophe in my kitchen. But I'm semi-happy with them, if for the taste alone. And they've got feet. God bless them, they've got feet. xoxo

Puff Schmuff

Okay.. let's just call this Oh hell I don't know what to call it. Meet my lopsided, falling over, super poofy shooting stars. Gah. I'm covered in fakking flour, I have egg wash on my pants, my lips are burning because I figured "well maybe they'll taste good" before the lil bastards cooled off, and my heart is broken. I spent two days on these vols-au-vent thingies. EEK! I forgot the important stuff during my initial ranting and raving! The September 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Steph of a whisk and a spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan. Continue on with the craziness... Palmier? BAHAHAHAA! I stressed over the perfect fillings. I researched the perfect goat's cheese mousse. I squashed grapes for these things. And for what??? Notice the burnt "shooting star" on the right? EVEN I'M EMBARRASSED TO SHOW YOU PHOTOS! Me! The gal who thrives on making a total ass of herself on the internets for your reading pleasure! *sigh* The chicken salad is placed ON THE SIDE because there were no INSIDES of these lil fakkers. I had such high hopes. I still have one millimeter of a sliver of hope still.. but it's only like 1/8 inch high.. not "such high" as with the first batch. Everything was going so well.. SO WELL. I only had one tiny ooze of butter yesterday and that was on the first turn.. FIVE TURNS LATER and no oozing. I wanted to kiss my puff pastry dough because it was behaving SO WELL. Oh I had poofiness alright.. just not the centered properly. :P And then the oven. That dirty bastage. It was not nice to my first batch which was supposed to be filled with the best tasting chicken salad EVER. But there's NOTHING to fill people! I docked! Apparently not deep enough.. but who the hell knew?? I did forget the silpat on top.. but seriously? How unforgiving a recipe to mock you just because you forget the silpat after doing everything else correctly??? That puff pastry dough has some issues and it needs to see a therapist, tout de suite. And lemme tell you, that therapist will earn his/her money dealing with this dough. My oven needs to go too. Screw my oven. I keep her clean. I cook lovingly on top of her. There's NO NEED for this kind of behavior. It's like a star shaped accordion. :P I'm spent, kids. I'm. Spent. Will post horrible photos later.. if I can talk my camera into not shutting it's lense in horror. If you happen to read this before I put my 2nd batch in (which is sitting, all shaped and stacked and egg washed in the fridge WITH A SILPAT ON TOP ALREADY), say a prayer for me. Please? Baking Gods I rue the day you were given uhhh.. Baking Godness Powers. May the fleas of a 1000 camels infest your flour-y armpits! :P~~~~~~~~~~~ xoxo Okay well.. slightly tipsy, but look at that poof! And well.. it's not really bleeding.. that's a concord grape reduction. Ohh and I ended up not finding a goat's cheese mousse recipe that I liked, but I found an AWESOME goat's cheese custard recipe on David Lebovitz's site. Bless him. :D ***THIS JUST IN: 2nd batch is BEEE-U-TEEEFULLLLLLL!!!! it's all about the silpat. I'll be damned. Photos of these babies will definitely be added as soon as they are cool enough to fill. :D xoxox Okay so maybe I got a lil uhmm.. frustrated before finishing. Oopsie. *grin* I haven't tried the goat's cheese custard & Concord grape reduction filled v-au-v's yet, but hubbs said they are fabulous. I did try the world's best chicken salad in a v-au-v and it was amazing. Eating the shell, just to taste it was very salty.. but you couldn't tell that with the fillings, thank goodness. :) Thanks so much Steph! Even though I SPAZZED out, this was a great challenge and I'm glad I've now got puff pastry in my freezer! Yay! :) Now that ya'll have seen my trainwreck.. go check out the 1000's of Vols-au-Vents on the Daring Baker's Blogroll xoxo

Beans Beans the Magical Fruit...

So yeah. Beans and I have never had a good relationship. Frankly, I loathe them. I hate the pasty texture of beans and the flavor certainly doesn't make up for texture, IMHO. I realize that I am in the minority and that I'm the weird one and I'm okay with this. :P No, seriously, I've been trying to get over my bean thing, especially this past year. My sister turned me on to a bean dip at a Mexican restaurant we like and I fell in love with it. Course it comes with 4 inches of the creamiest most delectible melted cheese on top so I can barely taste the beans, but nevertheless, I am now eating refried beans! Woot! Also, I've bought cans and bags of different types of beans. I even have "beluga" lentils sitting in my pantry! I WANT to like beans, dammit! Problem is.. I've overcome my dislike enough to PURCHASE beans, but they are all pretty much still sitting in my pantry. boo. So one day I get a email from a lovely gal named Lauren. She had a question about recipe archiving and although I couldn't help her (my recipe archive is archaic, and that's putting it nicely), her email was an introduction to her blog, Healthy Indulgences. Actually, I've mentioned her before in the Shrimp Fried "Rice" post of a few weeks back. Well the most recent recipe she had posted was this amazing looking flourless chocolate cake. Please.. go look right now. Seriously. When you are done drooling, come on back.. we'll wait for you. Didn't I tell you? Ah-mazing. AND it's gluten free. AND it's sugarless. AND it only has 5.7 grams net carbs per 1/10th of the cake.. that's a pretty decent sized slice! So other than substituting the sugar, what makes it so different from other flourless cakes? One of the main ingredients is BLACK BEANS. Yes, you read me right.. BEANS. WTF? I'm still unsure what place the beans take, other than ensuring a very moist cake. Does someone else know? Lauren? :) But you can't taste bean in the cake AT ALL. All you taste is deep, rich chocolate. So rich, in fact, that 1/10 of a cake is actually too big of a portion. Especially when you slather it with Lauren's low-carb chocolate buttercream frosting. *swoon* So all of this sounds fabulous doesn't it? I mean, LOOK AT THAT PHOTO on her blog. Now look at THIS photo: BAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA! Mmmm hmmm.. mine turned out to be the height of ONE of Lauren's layers. teeeee! GO ME! AGAIN! I swear to the baby Jebus, the fuckin' baking Gods just have it in for me. They NEVER cut me any slack. In fact, I'm sure they'd rather munch on LIVE BEES than make ANY baking project go perfectly for me. Fakk me, I'm not even asking for perfect, just you know.. correctly?? Gah. So here's what happened. I normally have just about any kind of cocoa you can imagine in my pantry. But I'll be dipped in turtle shit, if this time.. this ONE time that I needed regular old cocoa powder, I didn't have any. I have like TWENTY containers of Hershey's Special Dark dutch process cocoa and 15 containers of Scharffen Berger DUTCH PROCESS cocoa, but no regular old cocoa. Can you even imagine? Okay.. so there's the first "tweak" - using DP cocoa. The 2nd tweak was omitting the baking powder because of the DP cocoa. Ya'll might remember The Mothership and her twin brains? Well the "brain" reaction was due to the fact that I used baking powder with the DP cocoa and I didn't want that to happen with this cake, so I omitted the baking powder and used baking soda only. You'd think with 5 eggs the cake would still rise quite a bit more than it did, but my baking soda must be super old or this cake really needs the baking powder too? Fakk if I know, I can barely butter toast without some kind of chaos ensuing, let alone figure out the science behind what reactions are caused by what ingredients for crissakes. Everything else stayed true to the recipe. I used both Stevia and Erythritol. My cake was just sweet enough, actually a little less sweet than other flourless chocolate cakes, and that was perfect for me. I prefer less sweet when it comes to my chocolate. I even wrapped this cake up after it cooled and stored it in the fridge over night before frosting the next day, to ensure no beaniness. The frosting turned out wonderfully.. wasn't too sweet and had a great creamy texture. Slightly on the "cool" side, which I read is a characteristic of Erythritol.. it imparts a minty coolness into whatever you make with it, unless you add Xantham gum, which in this instance wasn't necessary. But even the coolness didn't take away from the deep chocolate flavor of the frosting. Two things I didn't like about the cake. Apparently Erythritol doesn't like to be refrigerated. It forms crystals that really take away from the texture of the cake.. it makes it feel like the cake is stale directly under the frosting. Another textural problem was that mine ended up being almost "solid" compared to Lauren's cake which was fluffy and full of air bubbles. The texture was a little on the spongy side. I took the cake into work, even though I could have eaten the whole damn thing without much guilt or bad side effects to my blood sugar. (I just don't want to get in the habit of having any kind of sweets in the house for more than a day or two) Two of the guys tried it the day I brought it in. One will eat anything that's chocolate and can't form an opinion other than it's good or bad. To him it was "good" - but I can assure you, had I dipped a dog turd in chocolate, he most likely would have said it was "good" because there was chocolate involved. The other guy always gives me good opinions on what I bring in.. not just good or bad, but why so good or why so bad.. and he said the flavor was really amazing, but the texture was off. Then I told them both it was sugar free and made with beans and neither could believe it. hehee! So two of us both thought the texture was off. Before writing this post, I left a comment on Lauren's blog with my opinion of the cake and what I did and didn't like.. she's already answered my questions! You just have to lurve her ;) I'll make this cake again, it's too damn good for someone like me who can't have a boat load of carbs at one sitting anymore. I'll use REGULAR cocoa powder, baking soda (which I will make sure is fresh) AND baking powder. A tip Lauren just gave me was to make sure I dust the pan with cocoa powder all the way up the sides so that the cake can climb. I didn't realize that. I'm unsure how far up I went last time, but next time I'll make sure the sides are dusted completely. And the last change will be, I won't refrigerate. My goodness, I'm hesitant to say it, but maybe with Lauren's advice and my making sure I've got the correct ingredients.. the next cake will turn out.. correctly? I'm unsure how I'd react? Myocardial infarction? Pee-Pee in my pants? Call Guiness?? Stay tuned my friends.. this could get interesting. ;) xoxo

An Infamous Cheesecake Indeed...

***I wrote this last night and figured I'd post today once I took some photos of the the 2 new varieties I made yesterday, but with the way my day is already started, who the heck knows when I'll get home to take photos - so I'm posting right now and ya'll just have to come back again to see the CAKE FROM HELL and the 2 new varieties. MUAHAHAHAHAA!*** Yesterday, I made a cheesecake. It was going to be a GLORIOUS cheesecake. One to be envied from every inhabitant of Cheesecake Land. I thought about this cake for a MONTH before even shopping for ingredients. I made LISTS people. I might have even sketched the cake it all of its MAGNIFICENCE. What a true beauty she would be. I was so proud of what I hadn't even started yet. I was PSYCHED. I was watching what the other members were showing off on our private forums and I was left breathless each time.. the creativity of their cakes was AWESOME. But still.. I kinda chuckled to myself thinking "Wait until they see MINE. They're gonna CRAP." Oh yeah, full to the gills with cockiness I was. MUAHAHAHAA! And in true Lisa form.. Allow me to present to you - the first Official Kitchen Disaster of 2009. *sigh* Oops.. first.. gotta take care of bidnezz. ;) The April 2009 challenge is hosted by Jenny from Jenny Bakes. She has chosen Abbey's Infamous Cheesecake as the challenge. Okay disaster or not - this is now my go-to cheesecake recipe. I've never had such a creamy cheesecake.. to die for, kids.. simply to die for. I said this before and I'll say it again.. HUGE pat on the back for Abbey for tweaking this recipe until she found cheesecake perfection.. and an equally HUGE hug for Jenny for bringing us this recipe. Bless both of yas cotton socks. ;) So there.. there you go - now it's documented, stamped, triplicated and carved in granite - LISA screwed this recipe up. LISA managed to take the perfect cheesecake recipe and totally noobed it right into the circular file cabinet. LISA is a cheesecake MURDERER. My favorite commercially made ice cream is Haagen Dazs Caramel Cone. You've got your sinfully rich caramel ice cream.. you've got a salty caramel ribbon running through it.. you've got chocolate covered sugar cone pieces throughout.. it's so good I could just BATHE in it. As a matter of fact, when the day comes that I stop breathing.. I'd like to be buried, completely submerged, in Caramel Cone ice cream. HEY YOU PEOPLE THAT LIVE IN MY NECK OF THE WOODS.. DON'T YOU DARE! GO BUY THIS ICE CREAM. IF I GO TO BUY IT AND IT'S SOLD OUT I WILL HUNT! YOU! DOWN! AND! BEAT! YOU! ABOUT! THE! HEAD! AND! SHOULDERS! WITH! MY! HUSBAND'S! DIRTY! TUBE! SOCKS! ***crickets*** So yeah.. what was I saying? RIGHT! I wanted to recreate my favorite ice cream flavor into a cheesecake. Caramel cheesecake, with a salted caramel ribbon running through it.. but instead of the chocolate covered sugar cones throughout, I thought they'd make a smashing presentation by crushing them up to wee lil pieces and then sticking them to the outside of the entire cake. Maybe even bring it up as a ring around the very top of the cake to use as a "dam" for a salted caramel "pool" on top. ARE YOU FUCKING DYING WITH THE ENVY YET??? Are ya'll writing this down?? Can you even imagine a more STUPENDOUS cheesecake EVER?? OHMYGOD. Figuring out how to make a caramel cheesecake was easy.. sub brown sugar for the white sugar the recipe called for. Easy. But if you're LISA you can't settle for easy so you start the Googling. And you read 1 (ONE) recipe that used DARK brown sugar and the author of the recipe said it was even more caramel-y than using light brown sugar so you are like.. OHYES! I WILL use DARK brown sugar for a more caramel-y cheesecake flavor! SQUEEEEEE! And you even tell a friend what you are going to and the friend will write back in a very supportive and just as excited way and say that the cheesecake will taste like "salted molasses" and she even DROOLED. And all I comprehended was the DROOL and how excited she was for my soon-to-be TRIUMPHANT cheesecake!!!! Salted molasses? One word. Eww. Unfortch for me, that I didn't figure out that lil gem until after my cake was baked. But even before that!! I had to make a caramel ribbon, right?? I had tried once before a long time ago, by using a very thick caramel sauce - but it baked into the cake and gave it a nice caramel flavor, but didn't give me the liquidy/fluidy ribbon I was hoping for. So my lovely friend suggested maybe making a batch of soft caramel.. rolling it into a rope and then arranging it over half the batter, topping with the rest of the batter and then another rope on top of that.. surely the caramel will cook and get melty and form a ribbon. And I'm sure she is right, but this batter is extremely thin, so there's no way it would have held the weight of the caramel rope, they just would have sank to the bottom. :( I got to Googling again.. and my search parameters brought up a commercial cheesecake store in Wyoming (I think?) who had described one of their cheesecakes with a caramel ribbon running through it.. but when I realized it was a site to BUY their cakes and not a site for recipes, I back buttoned to see what else the Googling brought to me.. it was slim fuckin' pickins, lemme tell ya. So in my DESPERATION, I went back to the cheesecake sellin' site and found their contact page and PLEADED with them to tell me the secret to getting a ribbon of caramel throughout a cheesecake. I PLEADED. I'm sure when they read it they thought I had gone batshit crazy to be asking them instead of PLACING AN ORDER like every SANE person would be doing with that contact form. (they never did write me back.. imagine.) I said screw it. We don't need no stinkin caramel ribbon. Instead I will make a rich, luxurious, salted caramel sauce. And I shall spoon that sweet/salty nectar over the crust of my cheesecake and then I will put that pool of pure heaven on the top of my cake and I will still get the flavors of my beloved ice cream. (Do you think I chucked this idea after I made the caramel sauce using golden syrup (following the recipe from November's Golden Caramels) that might have been bad because the caramel sauce had a chemically ass-like taste to it? Read on, naive people.. read on...) Well OF COURSE the caramel sauce baked into the crust!! OF COURSE IT DID. Because that's what fakkin happens. It's SENSIBLE. LOGICAL. RESPONSIBLE. PRACTICAL. And the baking Gods wouldn't be JOYFULLY. PLAYFULLY. WATCHING ME. Nor would they be laughing and pointing at me. Fuckers. And finally.. my genius idea of the chocolate covered sugar cone bits hugging my DELICIOUS cheesecake did not work out either. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? I thought I was making a wise decision by going to a very popular chain ice cream store and purchasing their chocolate covered wafer cones. They were cheap, and it would be more convenient than buying a box of regular sugar cones and dipping them in chocolate myself, right? Wrong. Wafer cones, apparently, are way different from sugar cones. And anyone with ONE eye would know this. They obviously don't even look the same. But this did not stop Lisa. Oh hells no. I bought several of those wafer cones and didn't even taste one until after the cake was ready for them.. They were hideous. Gaggable. They were wrong. First the cone was so fake vanilla tasting that I did gag. I really am not a vanilla fan.. lil vanilla here and there I'm okay with.. permeated through whatever a wafer cone is made of is just wrong. And the chocolate the cone is dipped in? Not chocolate, my friends. Oh noooo.. it's that chocolate flavored substance that leaves a waxy mouth feel if you eat it. My guess is they also use this substance as some kind of water-proofing mastic for basements and rooftops. Shame on you Popular Ice Cream Chain! Shame on you for cutting corners on your wafer cones! I have never ate your ice cream and I will NEVER eat your ice cream now. SHAME ON YOU! And also, I'd like my $4.35 back please. So said wafer cones hit the garbage can tout de suite. But I still needed something for the "dam" damnit. After checking out cupboards and pantries.. nothing jumped out at me, so I grabbed more graham crackers.. crushed 'em up and made a ring around the top of the cake, then half-assed spreading them on the outside edges just because I had so much left. I then poured the noxious caramel sauce on top. And then I watched the noxious caramel sauce break through the graham cracker dam and slide down the side of the cake, over the edge of the plate an onto my counter top. I just about imploded at that point. I picked up the plate, used my finger to wipe off as much of the sauce as I could, then just FLINGING it in the direction of my sink because I DIDN'T CARE ANYMORE and threw the fuckin' thing in the fridge. Even after all of this, I had hoped that the flavors would meld and mellow out after a long chill. Yeah no.. that didn't happen either. The one and only TRUE THING that I did WRONG with this cake is to NOT look at it and scream "YOU ARE NOT A MILLION DOLLARS" because for everything I thought was right about the cake, was so pitifully wrong that SURELY had I screamed those words it would have magically turned into a huge fucking pile of $100 bills. GOOD DAY PEOPLE. GOOD DAY. xoxo I made a boatload of mini's.. the first one is for Hubbs.. plain with a simple blueberry & orange compote on top (fakker wouldn't thicken for me like it usually does) And for moi! Orange cheesecake with a seriously thick layer of semi-sweet chocolate poured over it. *slurp* xoxo

July and Buttercream.. Two Bitter Lovers

Chris from Mele Cotte was our hostess this month - and a lovely hostess at that! Chris chose Filbert Gateau with Praline Buttercream as our Daring Baker challenge for the month of July. I had mixed feelings.. I won't lie. Since my "lifestyle change" is still in effect, when I saw the cake included buttercream and chocolate, well I could feel my adrenaline start pumping and there seemed to be an instant bounce in my step.. CHOCOLATE. OHMYGOD HOW I MISS THEE SO MUCH. On the other hand, as much as I love the buttercream, ugh.. I've had enough of it to last me a good long while AND the temps in NE Ohio are pretty high with the mugginess at about 593% - just a smidge uncomfortable in these parts. ;) I'm a lucky gal as we've got central air but I wondered if it'd be enough to keep my buttercream thick and workable.. Mmmm hmmm.. I present to you the answer to that question: Allow me to fill ya'll in on the July Kitchen Disaster of 2008. I was on vacation the week I decided to make the cake - it was the perfect time because we were going to a sleep over at 2 of my bestest friends' house and I knew I could unload the fat/calorie laden cake on them.. so I started on Monday and made the pistachio (Bless Chris' heart, she gave us lots of room to personalize this cake.. changing the nut being one of them) flour and pistachio praline. Both went off without a hitch. I got back to the cake on Friday.. making the cake was, again, no problem.. my 2 layers puffed up nicely and were quite pretty in an green kind of way. hee! I decided to go with my go-to buttercream recipe from Jacques Torres because I'm confident in my ability to make that frosting without problems and wasn't really up to trying yet another buttercream recipe in the heat and humidity of my kitchen. Well, I guess it didn't matter what recipe I went with.. my house was just too warm and sticky even with the A/C BLASTING at Antarctic temperatures. I couldn't get this stuff to thicken up for the life of me. So I threw it in the freezer - and by that I mean, I literally threw the KA mixing bowl full of delicious buttercream soup into our chest freezer. :D Saturday morning.. I OF COURSE get side tracked on DB stuff and email catch up duties.. so I've got about 2 hours to crank this cake out and make the 3 snackers I had planned on bringing. You know, I've been in this position more times than I can count.. actually every time. I am late for everything - the quintessential procrastinator extraordinare. Seriously. And it doesn't matter how many times I rush to finish something before the deadline - it doesn't matter that I'm a heaping sack of nerves, angst and perspiration as I bolt out the door to get where I'm suppose to be within an hour (or two) of when I was suppose to initially be there. It doesn't matter how I call myself names and then give myself the silent treatment for being such an ASSHOLE every single time. I conveniently forget all of that the next time I'm procrastinating about something.. GAH. So this shouldn't come as a shock, but the very second I stepped foot in my kitchen that morning, the sky started to cloud over, I could smell the smoke from the firey depths of hell tickle my nostrils, I could sense pending disaster in the air.. yet I actually ignored it all and sliced my two layers into 4 layers. I added the praline to my barely thawed buttercream that barely thickened up after the deep freeze. I made a so-good-you-could-drink-with-a-straw soaking syrup of sugar, orange juice and Grand Marnier. I got out my brush, my offset spatula and my plastic lazy susan thingie that cake decorators use and I bravely began assembly. First layer of cake and buttercream looked good! I had hope! Second layer.. not so much.. buttercream started to thin again.. but that's okay because my plan was to throw it in the fridge the very second I had all 4 layers together so it could set up while I started my antipasto salsa (mmm mmm good, btw!) and brie/strawberry jam filled phyllo cups (swoon).. third layer? Well.. the leaning Tower of Pisa came to mind.. and I started looking for my bamboo skewers.. fakk it, it won't take but a second to get that fourth and final layer on! Instructions said to soak the cut side of that final layer with the syrup and then flip it over so the even side was on top.. at least that's what I thought I read - to this day I'm not really sure if I was imagining that step or not. Anyhoo.. soaked she be.. carefully flip her over on the top of the lean-to and then.. and then I'm holding a piece of the layer in each hand and the rest of it kinda just flooped onto the top of the cake. FAKK ME. It took a few seconds for me to get over the shock of the breakage. I mean, I know I shouldn't have been surprised - this is par for the course when I'm baking - but I was like.. "You've got to be fucking kidding me. WHY NOW?? DEAR GOD, WHY NOW???" And then I started laughing. Kinda like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit when he poured the last bucket of hot water into the tub, causing the tub to go crashing through the floor.. that kind of laugh where you are pretty damn sure you have just lost the very last semblance of your fucking mind and are also expecting Candid Camera personnel to pop out from behind the Frigidaire, pointing and laughing at you? Only no one came popping out and apparently I had partial control of my mind because the panic started to set in.. I had less than an hour to finish all this AND get my butt into the shower so I didn't smell like buttercream and goat. I simply turned my palms over and let the two pieces fall where they may.. I kinda nudged the part that flooped out on the cake over and like a puzzle, tried to put the pieces together. I probably would have had more success if I had chosen to move the pieces with the Vulcan Mind Meld technique than adding the heat from my hands to the buttercream.. but again, there wasn't much of my mind left at this point. I finally cried UNCLE! And realized this cake wasn't going anywhere.. so the cake, complete with plastic lazy susan cake decorator thingie was thrown into the upright freezer in my kitchen. Course that would be after I opened it's door and half the contents came flying out at me - frozen blocks of tuna, bag of hard lil meatballs, 3 pound sack of sharp strawberry chunks, various ice cubes and I think there was a package of chicken sausage that came at me like a torpedo. So yeah, once I dodged all of that, the cake went in, I slammed the door and decided to stop thinking about it.. LALALALALALALALAALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU! YOU DON'T EXIST FUCKING SPLOOGEY MELTY BROKEN CAKE LALALALALALALALALAAAA I didn't think about the cake the rest of the night and managed to at least accomplish the goal of getting completely hammered. I was suckin' down jello shots through a turkey injector, people! YEEE HAW!!! I have no recollection of saying good night to my fine hosts.. I have no recollection of finding the guest room.. getting into bed.. nothing. All I know is that I woke up the next morning and WANTED TO DIE. My hairs hurt. My clothes hurt. I hadn't been that hung over since way back in my drinking days say.. oh.. 10-15 years ago? Holy mother of a hairless Chin. I thought for sure I was going to meet my maker at any second. So as you might imagine, the thought of that cake didn't enter my mind AT ALL on Sunday either. Monday night rolled around and I was still hung-over, I shit you not. But now I was hungry again and nothing was going to cure what ailed me other than chocolate and buttercream, so I took that frozen bitch out of the freezer and whipped up a delectable ganache. I sliced the uneven (to say the least) sides off and poured that sweet sweet nectar over the top.. I even salvaged a lil buttercream from the other freezer and made a pretty decoration... HEE! Okay, horror stories aside, ultimately I'd like to make out with Chris for chosing such an amazing cake.. the taste was phenomenal. I'm not sure if it was the flavors I chose (pistachio, orange, chocolate and raspberry [the preserves I slathered all over it before pouring the ganache]) or if it was because I truly SOAKED the layers in that syrup.. but it was sooooo moist and the orange/choc/raspberry together was just over the top. Did I mention that I SOAKED the cake in the syrup? NOM NOM NOM *slurp* I did NOT take this cake in to share with the co-workers. NO. I. DID. NOT. I sliced her up and froze the slices :D Oh yes my friends.. Lissee will not share this cake with anyone, cellulite be damned. As of today, there are 8 slices left.. let's see if I can make it through the entire summer before depleting my supply. HAR! Excellent challenge! Loved it! Will most likely NEVER make it again! At least not in the summer months.. hehee Ya'll know the drill.. start clickin' on that blogroll and commence with the droolage! xoxo

Wish Me Luck! Also, My Mad Frosting Skillz are Back!

I'm up at the crack of freakin' dawn on a Saturday when I wanted to sleep in until AT LEAST 6:30.. Gah. What happened to the days of staying up (and usually out) until 4 in the morning and sleeping until noon? Yanno.. this growing up/old shit is for the birds. :P Anyhoo.. I guess excitement might have a little bit to do with why I'm up so fakkin early. You see, today we are headed off to a casino! My very first casino ever. I use to be a bingo freak. Yeah, I know.. but Shuuuushz! I don't tell that to many people. :P Anyhoo.. I wouldn't go for the actual Bingo, I went for those damn instant win tickets.. if you've ever been to a bingo hall or a Catholic church festival, you know what I mean. Colorful tickets about the size of an Ipod with little paper tabs on the front.. you open up the tabs to find out what you've won - IF you've won. Addicting. Horribly bad - close to 12 step - addicting. At least for me. And then.. THEN some moron decides it'd be a good idea to open up little shops all through the city that sells the lil tickets! No Bingo! Just the tickets.. OMG I would count the SECONDS until my lunch hour so I could go rip through $20-$40 a day. A DAY. So you see.. gambling and I are bad juju. I haven't been to a bingo hall in years and I haven't ripped through any instant win tickets since this past summer (Hey! I support my Catholic churches! Do not judge me!) and that was only 2 festivals. :P Hubbs has wanted to go to one of these casinos that have popped up everywhere for years now and my response has always been, "We can't afford it, dear." Well this year, the pathetic look on his face when I announced that I was going to go pay off all sorts of bills with our tax refunds got to me. So I asked how much he wanted and what he wanted to do with it. "Casino trip!" was all he said. So everyone keep their fingers and toes crossed.. and send the good juju, folks! For we are casino headed. Woot! And since I've got all this time this morning, I decided to forego some behind the scenes DB work and post another Kitchen Disaster!! It's been so long.. I have missed my KD posts so muchly. Bobby Deen. Paula's hunky and still single youngest son. Twas his birthday and the Deen folks decided it'd be a cute episode for Paula's Home Cookin' - the premise was Paula tricking her youngest son into helping her cook his favorite foods for his own birthday party. ha! ha! Gah. If you are a Deen fan, like myself, and own any one of her dessert cookbooks, then ya'll know that Bobby's favorite cake is a caramel cake. I've looked at the instructions for this cake many times and nothing about it ever tripped my trigger. Until! Until I watched them make it. The recipe says to poke lots of holes in the cake with a toothpic so the caramel sauce can seep in.. well Paula, bless her buttery clogged arteries, used the end of a wooden spoon to poke LARGE holes in the cake before pouring the sauce on. Yes, kids. THAT'S what tripped my trigger. (it never does take much for me) So off I went.. as per usual, when baking cakes, my cake turned out beautifully - it rose to a lovely height and turned all goldeny brown and delicious looking. The smell was heavenly, as even Paula's recipes are not sacred in my kitchen. I gave it a lil twist and added 3 ripe bananas to the batter. *swoon* My caramel sauce turned out beautifully as well. As it pretty much should have, considering I've been making it for years now (is essentially the same recipe as Gracie's Toffee Sauce for her Croissant Bread Pudding). The poking of big holes went without a hitch.. the pouring of the caramel sauce was also a breeze. And then. And then it was time to frost with caramel frosting. The making of the frosting started off well - again with the caramel sauce base, then you transfer the sauce to a mixer and beat in a pound of confectioners' sugar and vanilla. It's a little thin at first so you beat until it becomes "spreading" consistency. Well my loves, somehow I drove past spreading consistency and crashed head on into fudge consistency. Seriously. I now know how to make caramel fudge. Seriously good caramel fudge. But did I press my fudge into a pan, cut it into little squares and enjoy it as fudge? No. I figured it was still spreadable. Yeah. No. I'll let my photos do the rest of the talkin'. And if you are wonderin' if it still tasted good.. well it did. The cake was moist, sweet and banana-y. The caramel sauce and the caramel "frosting" was buttery with just the right amount of salt to counter the super sweet that caramel can get. It was just a long chew to get through a slice. :P Have a fabulous weekend! If you're bored.. make yourself some caramel fudge! Perfectly baked cake with perfectly cooked caramel sauce Bottom layer covered with the caramel sauce Top layer with oozing caramel sauce *swoon* Caramel fudge covered Banana Caramel cake - not the best looking, but not THAT bad, right? Right?? The Other Side. :P A slice of delicious Banana cake filled with decadent caramel sauce and slathered with a very thick layer of caramel fudge. Gah. xoxo

Mine Don't Look Like Gracie's :P

I thought about titling this post "Kitchen Disaster Pt. 1,408" but the more I think about it, the more I realize this was just a near-disaster.. they turned out very nicely - although I had to go through a panic attack and a near call to 911 to get there. I had some friends over for dinner last night and these particular people are the friends I invited over a few months ago for dessert. I had planned on making my Daring Baker challenge that day to share with them. The challenge? The Martha's Crepe Cake. Yes, well.. we all know how that first attempt at crepes turned out. I'm still picking dried crepe pieces/parts off my kitchen walls. The original plan was to make them this month's Daring Baker challenge.. but well.. uhmm.. I decided that I'd better not press the "bad juju" button and take the chance that all this time it's not been my horrible baking skills that have put many a dessert in precarious situations - but maybe it was just them. Maybe they were dessert demons. Quite possibly, their karma - obviously a black aura around anything involving sugar and butter - was f*cking with my baked goods. This could happen! Shuttit nay-sayers!!! :P And so.. I didn't want to take the chance that I might screw up this month's challenge so I went in search of a dessert that I thought I could whip up without any problems. Something, quite possibly, that I've made before. My usual recipe websites didn't hold anything that sounded good, nor did the several cookery books I thumbed through.. next were some favorite blogs. I did find a boatload of recipes that I really, really wanted to make but I kept coming back to the last photo in this post by the Queen of All That Is Fattening and Delicious, my Gracie. Go ahead.. go look at that last photo and you'll see why I was so mesmerized. I'll wait. Uhhmm.. you've got a lil drool hanging off your chin. Now I've made Pate a Choux before AND I've made Diplomat Cream before, both thanks to the lovely and brilliant, Helene of Tartelette, when she hosted a Daring Baker challenge a couple month's ago. She had us making the St. Honore Gateau, which included learning how to make the Pate a Choux, Diplomat cream and revisiting puff pastry. A sea of Eclairs Gracie's recipe was pretty similar with the addition of cocoa powder to the Pate a Choux and the chocolate added to the Diplomat Cream, and with photos like that, how could I not give these a go?? And so I set off in making the cream first so I could get it into the fridge. Absolutely no problems.. I even tempered my eggs correctly and only had a very small amount of scrambled egg left in the strainer. I was very proud of myself at that point.. you see, tempering eggs always brings nightmarish memories back of the blood orange curd I once attempted. It smelled of ass. Remember? Anyhoo.. I produced this thick pudding consistency pastry cream- so chocolately, so velvety smooth. *swoon* I even whipped the cream correctly to medium peaks and since Helene taught me the proper way of folding, I didn't loose any floof in the diplomat cream! It was magical. =) The perfect chocolate pastry cream cooling before turning it into diplomat cream Next was the Pate a Choux.. again, no problems whatsoever.. okay so my piping skills blow monkey balls, but that's okay! The paste came together beautifully! Before and afters of my monkey ball blowing piping skills :P Here's where the problems start. I'm pretty sure that my constant amazement that everything was going so well is the cause of my temporarily losing my mind for a few minutes as I put both trays of eclair shells in the oven - BEFORE it had even preheated to the instructed 425º F. I realized this soon after I put them in and figured they couldn't even have started the baking process yet, so I removed them until the lil bell went off. (I know. I know! I should have let the oven preheat for at least 30 minutes after the bell went off to be sure of even temperature but it's freakin hot out for crissakes!!) Ohh and the bell went off approximately 45 seconds after I removed them. Doh. So I shoved 'em back in, finished washing the dishes and went to plop my fat ass down in the living room to wait for the lil eclairs to puff and turn goldeny brown. I'd say about 5 minutes had passed when I first smelled it.. smoke. WHAT THE HELL? I ran back into my kitchen to see pillowy puffs of white/gray smoke seeping out the front of the oven. I opened the door and what do I see? My parchment paper was on fire! Scorching the hell outta my lil close-to-perfect eclair shells. I might have shouted obscenities when this was discovered. Oh who the hell am I trying to fool? I called my oven every dirty name I could come up with.. I was like a foul mouthed machine gun - stuck on rapid fire. I couldn't even count how many times the F-bomb was dropped. I might have also cursed my friends at that point as well. I am not proud of that and I do not truly wish bad things to come to them, such as their teeth rotting out of their heads or a nasty case of hives settling in for the next 20 years. Really, I did not mean those things. Honest. But C'MON! Was it just coincidence that this happened? I use parchment paper all the time at all kinds of temperatures - it's NEVER caught on fire before. I make two desserts for these people and both times something HORRIFIC happens. I'm telling you.. BAD DESSERT KARMA played a major part in this almost-fiasco! A couple things I didn't mention - somewhere in the process of making these, I knocked over my basket of cooking utensils AND I didn't read the instructions completely as I forgot to take butter out to bring to room temp, so I had to nuke it. As you can see from the butter puddle, I nuked it too long. :P 'kay well the next thing I had to do was get the cookie sheets out of the oven, blow out the fire, turn the oven temp down to 350º and transfer them to another cookie sheet sans parchment paper. They were nice and poofy too.. beautifully rounded and smooth on top. *sob* In the 2 minutes it took to transfer them to a non-smoldering sheet pan, they all collapsed. They looked like lil wrinkly dog turds. :( I had hoped that they would poof up again once they were put back in, but alas, they did not. Ohh and I should mention and probably take a moment of silence here - I did end up losing 10 shells.. they were just too charred to go on living. *sigh* Once they were dry in the middle I took them out and looked at them in disgust. I walked back to my office and promptly e-mailed Gracie with my story in hopes that A- she'd see the email within the next hour or two and B- have a fantastic suggestion for a way to use my gorgeous Diplomat cream in another way. Unfortunately, she did not see my e-mail so I decided that although I now had wrinkly turd-like looking shells, that after I filled them with the cream and doused the tops in the chocolate glaze that maybe they'd look okay. And if they didn't? TOO F*CKING BAD. I was going to serve them and if I had to shove them down everyone's throats myself! Then I would. I had no time to make anything else - not even time to run up to the store for something.. so these were going to have to do! :P Luckily, as you can see (squint, people!) they didn't end up looking too horribly bad.. a lil flat, a lil mishapen, but otherwise quite tasty looking. And they WERE delicious. I had to quality control them, doncha know. There was just too much chocolate involved to take a chance not knowing how they tasted before I served them, yes?? Diet be damned, my friends. Diet Be Damned. These eclairs were not too sweet, which is what I (and I found out later that my guests agreed) loved the most about them. They were perfect with a cup of coffee and/or a glass of red wine. So there you have it.. a near kitchen disaster. I'm glad I persevered and saw them to the end as they did turn out to be the perfect dessert after a dinner of filet mignon and langoustines. *swoon* I won't post the recipe here - if you so desire to make these - and really kids, so desire to - you can get the recipe off of Gracie's blog here Thanks for another fanfarkingtabulous recipe, Gracie!! :D Two lil half nekked guys, missing their bottoms (I turned the tops over and filled them) due to FIRE. xoxo

It's All Done With Mirrors...

Dear Sweet Baby Jebus. Yet ANOTHER Daring Baker conquest. Wait! Hold on.. I gotta go look up "conquest"... 1: the act or process of conquering Mmmm hmmm.. okay that's a good word. Yes this was a conquest because it involved several highly scary steps, especially to a novice baker like myself. But! Because I AM a Daring Baker, I knew I could rise to this challenge and come out the other side hootin' and hollerin' VICTORY!!! But.. uhh.. just to play it safe, I asked a Tartelette to come help me. squeeeeeeeee! As most of you are aware by now (and if you aren't - where the freeg have you been?), Helene came to visit me for 5 glorious days of shopping, eating, baking, eating, cooking, exercising and eating. And during two of those days, we made this month's Daring Baker challenge recipe, a strawberry "mirror" cake, chosen by my favorite Queen of All That Is Fattening and Sugary - Gracie. Or some of you might know her as Peabody. Yes, my Gracie was this month's hostess with the mostess and the Strawberry Mirror Cake recipe she chose came from "Cakes and Pastries At The Academy by the California Culinary Academy 1993". When I first saw this, I instantly remembered a cake recipe I'd seen on either allrecipes.com or recipezaar.com which was a raspberry mirror cake and although I didn't save that recipe (way to scary for me) it stayed with me. So I guess I had mixed feelings when I read Gracie's choice. On one hand I was tickled pink as there were no fakkin crepes to mess with, but on the other hand, sponge cake? bavarian cream? strawberry gelatin? God. I kinda eyed my fancy, still pretty much brand spankin' new, French crepe pan with a new appreciation for it. :P Soooooo.. what did I think about this cake, eh? I thought about maybe playing it off as a not so bad of an experience because I didn't want to hurt Gracie's feelings.. but I think I've made it pretty damn clear by now - my most dreadful experiences are usually my most favorite. And besides, this would have nothing to do with Gracie and her wondefulness.. this would have to do with how one single person can still f*ck up a cake even with a French Pastry Chef standing 2 inches to her right. GOD. Okay to be truthful, I don't remember much as this was the longest cake baking session of ALL TIME. Not that that's a bad thing - it was a great thing! Helene and I did more chatting (and sauce & ball making) than anything else that first day and I remember it with great fondness. Uhh aside from my barking footsies. You know, other than my bladder (which is thimble sized apparently), my feet are the smallest things about me.. and let me tell you, my friends, once they start feeling "unhappy" well, they don't let you forget it for a fakkin second. Although, to be fair we did accomplish a lot that day.. kinda. I remember wine? Anyhoo.. there are several steps to a mirror cake, I've learned. The first is the sponge cake. Now from hearing from my fellow Daring Baker chicas and chicos, this cake wasn't easy for some. For me (us) it wasn't a problem. I believe it was due to that French gal and her egg beating abilities. My (our) cakes came out nice and fluffy, although slightly over done. HEY we were chatting!! Those set aside, I (we) started on the bavarian cream. Here's where the nightmare started. Okay well.. the actual making of the bavarian cream was not a problem. We (I) had no problems with the gelatin setting too quickly over the strawberry puree. I (we) might have given it a lil stir, I can't recall. But I have no recollection of any one part of this bavarian cream making going wrong. It poured nicely over the slightly dry (shutit!) sponge cake and was just enough to cover the cake completely yet still leaving enough room on the top for the "mirror". I (we) put it in the fridge to set up over night because well.. did I mention my barkin footsies? Sauce? Meatballs? W.I.N.E.? Yeah it was time to pack it in for the night, have a lil din-din and get some sleep. Oh, I should probably mention, (now keep in mind we still had the final step to finish) we started this challenge around 1:30 in the afternoon and we didn't finish it until 10 pm that night. BAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA! I TOLD YOU it was the longest cake making session EVER. Next morning we were up and at it early (NOT) - 'kay once we (I) dragged our (my) dead arses out of the office and into the shower it was probably already 10ish. We still needed to run up to the store because we ran out of gelatin when making the bavarian cream and couldn't finish the "mirror" part without it. Suffice to say, that the actual mirror layer was a breeze to make (I think some French gal did it?) and I was already focused on macarons. Dudes! She taught me macarons!! WOOO!! Our (my) challenge cake was set back into the fridge to set up and we had planned on cutting into it that night after dinner. Blah blah macarons blah blah deee blah blah buttercream blah blah blah dee blah blah crunchedy light and fluffy shells blah blah blah lemon-ginger dee blah blah later.. the dinner dishes were done and it was time to cut the cake!!! We were all quite excited at the prospect of this.. as my sis and mom were there and had heard so much about the cake. heeeeeeee. So I (we) took it out and warmed up the ring on the springform before gently removing it.. it left some "scars" on the sides, but we chose to ignore this.. what we couldn't ignore was, uhmm.. the color. At least I couldn't quite get past it and I did a quick search for my sunglasses. Mmmm hmmm what was a gorgeous shade of light pink when put into the refrigerator the night before had turned both dark and yet bright over night. I'd say.. somewhere between magenta and Pepto Bismol. Certainly not the light "strawberry kissed" shade of pink that the cake in the photo looked like. But that's okay - after all I was born and raised under the motto of "Who cares what it looks like as long as it tastes good!" And so slicing commenced. As I passed a plate of hot pink cake to each family member I thought to myself, "Hmmm.. this bavarian cream feels as if I'm slicing through Jell-o". So I gave the platter a lil shimmie shake and the whole cake kinda bloobled and wiggled. Not really knowing what that would mean as far a texture goes, we all grabbed forks and took ourselves a great big bite of hot pink... melted erasers? I was sitting across the table from my mom.. and the look on her face, really was priceless. My sister politely put down her fork and dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin. I kinda poked at it a bit and went in for another forkful hoping I'd just hit up on a spot where maybe the gelatin didn't dissolve completely. Nope, not so lucky. The texture of my (our) cake was rather spongey but yet also quite rubbery. The cake layers themselves, were about as dry as the Mojave, but they were light and fluffy. So that's good, right? Now the mirror part.. well that part I scraped off the rest of my slice and ate it by itself. It was the best strawberry jello I've ever had. The party broke up soon after and I tried my hardest to pack up a few slices (and by a few slices I mean half the cake) for my mom but she ran out of the house with her arms clamped firmly to her sides. I eyed both Nigel and Chloe who were looking at me with this glint of hope in their eyes, but I just could not give them any. I love my dogs. So what the hell went wrong? I don't know.. I originally thought it was because we let the bavarian cream set up too long by keeping it in the fridge over night and most of the next day. But, from reading comments left by other Daring Bakers, others had left their cakes in the fridge for that long - or longer - and they didn't seem to get the rubber sponge effect. And then I though, "Oh No. The gelatin measurement was a typo. It wasn't suppose to be 4 (FOUR) 2 1/2 (Why the hell I wrote FOUR TBS is a mystery. Sorry, I must have lost my mind for a brief moment. hee) tablespoons!!" So I wrote to Gracie and asked if that was a possibility. Bless her cotton socks, she went back to the book to check but it was the correct measurement. She made good sense by saying that the bavarian cream needed to be stiff to hold the mirror. I'm convinced that my (our) bavarian cream rose above and beyond the stiff factor. And let's not forget that spongey texture too (not the actual sponge cake, but the cream was spongey).. what the hell happened there, I have no idea. The good news is.. this can't be an all bad recipe, because it's sounding like my bad experience wasn't the experience of many of the others. Hell one gal (you're going to have to go read to find out who!) won 3rd place in a bake-off contest with her Strawberry Mirror Cake! I'm so damn proud of her. =) Do you think I'd be nominated for a "Most Outstanding Use of Photoshop" award? :P But all in all, this was a fantabulous experience for me. I learned how to make a sponge cake - and seriously, if we hadn't been chit chatting and not paying attention, we would have taken it out on time and it would have been superb. It had a really good flavor - although if there ever was another time I'd make this I would pour the soaking liquid on it after poking holes all through the layers. That might have helped with the dryness of over baking it. And really? What more could I ask for.. I had one of my closest and dearest friends with me the whole time, making me forget about my barkin' feet, causing my face to be in constant smile mode, and just generally feeling damn happy that I started this blogging hobby of mine 16 months ago. =) Okay.. so here's the deal, kids.. we no longer have individual Daring Baker blogrolls on our personal blogs. We've decided to create a blog to specifically house the "official" Daring Baker blogroll that we can update constantly. So will still point to my right sidebar, which will direct you to a link which will bring you to the list of our active and gorgeous members. Woot! Whatcha waiting for?? Go read! :D xoxo

BAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!!

I just got done reading comments - THANKS you guys! =) And the last one was from Brilynn, who said - and I quote! "Ah lis, the crispy sundried tomato bagels look like they're covered in bugs! Yes I know, that's know something you want anywhere near food, but it was funny to me... " BAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!!!! She's right!! After I read her comment, I clicked back over to the post to see what the hell she was talking about.. and well.. BAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!! OMG tears are STREAMING down my cheeks right now.. SO FUNNY!! I heart you, Bril =) xoxo

Bagels... Bageljacks... Bagelcakes.. Bageldiscs..

Hey Hey! It's that time of the month again.. The Daring Baker June Challenge post! WOO! Have you missed us?? Ya'll might guess from the subject of this post, that this month's DB challenge didn't go so swell for me. Imagine that, eh? Before I get into this kitchen disaster, I want to stress to ya'll that this was NOT the recipe's fault (meaning this recipe is NOT possessed by Beelzebub).. this recipe, when executed properly, will give you big beautiful bagels. And the best tasting bagels you've ever had. Even when you totally screw up, your bagels will still be so flavorful! Flat as pancakes.. but still wayyyyy yummy! ;) This particular kitchen disaster did not come with exploding batter, aliens invading my kitchen, or a need to start drinking heavily half way through.. I believe this is a good recipe - an excellent recipe actually.. especially if you are a more advanced baker with lots of experience in using yeast and working with dough. BUT, for someone like myself who is not at all familiar with making bread or other yeast doughs, I believe it's a recipe that you really need to make twice. Once to make all your mistakes and take notes.. and the second time to produce amazing bagels. I'd call this recipe and excellent "teaching" recipe. Seriously, I learned A LOT about yeast and dough this month. And that's what it's all about, eh? =) I haven't made my 2nd batch yet - but I will, you can be assured. And I am confident that my next batch will be perfect. This month's challenge was hosted by our lovely, Jenny of All Things Edible, and the beautiful Freya of Writing At The Kitchen Table. They decided that June would be a month we step away from the sugar and dive right into the savory. Real Honest Jewish Purist's Bagels is the recipe they chose and a fine recipe and choice it was. I was tickled when I saw what we'd be making because I am so afraid of working with yeast. My only experience with it is my Auntie's pizza dough, which I make a few times a year. So badly I want to be the kind of gal who makes her own bread items every week. There is NOTHING like fresh bread, is there? So yeah, the thought of working with yeast and having all the support the wonderful Daring Bakers give backing me up - I knew I'd at least get a lil closer to feeling comfortable working with yeast & dough. And they did not disappoint! The support was amazing - thank you everyone! A plain Bageljack No, my bagels did not turn out well in the looks department. They ended up being flat as pancakes and/or flapjacks and/or compact discs, etc. But like I said, they were the best tasting bagels I've ever had - and I've had a lot of bagels. I feel I know why mine did not turn out though.. and it's much more than my just being a moron. ha! The recipe says and I'll quote here: "Soon you should have a nice stiff dough. It will be quite elastic, but heavy and stiffer than a normal bread dough. Do not make it too dry, however... it should still give easily and stretch easily without tearing." I obviously don't know what a normal bread dough feels like, so I kinda guessed.. meaning I stopped adding flour once the dough stopped being sticky. Mistake No. 1 I should have kept incorporating the flour until I used up the whole 8 cups the recipe called for. Instead I think I stopped at around 6.5 - 7 cups. Ohhh it was flexible alright.. but not very heavy or stiff. In fact it was quite soft. After you knead the dough you put it into a lightly greased bowl and allow it to double in size.. my pizza dough takes about an hour to double.. therefore I didn't even check my bagel dough until an hour had passed. Ooops! I should have realized that the FOUR TABLESPOONS of yeast might quicken that rise time just a tad.. as you can see, she not only doubled - but I believe she tripled and/or quadrupled. hahaha! Mistake No. 2 Yes that is cat food/water bowls you see.. No she did not jump up on the dryer while the dough was rising - covered - because I was running the dryer, which scares the bejebus out of her. MUAHAHAA! Check your dough after 20-30 minutes - don't let it rise too much. After your dough doubles in size, you are to punch it down.. and where this recipe says "punch" it's not kidding. You really need to punch most of the air out of it.. this step was great in relieving some tension from a chaotic week at work. ;) After you punch it down, you divide it up into 15 (I got way more than 15) hunks o'dough, to which you will shape into bagels. There are two methods to shaping.. the first being the "dough-centric" method.. where you make a long cylindrical "snake" of dough and wrap it around your hand into a loop and then mash the ends together. The other is the "hole-centric" method, where you shape the dough into a rough sphere, then poke a hole through the middle with a finger and then pull at the dough around the hole to make the bagel. I went with the "hole-centric" method. Although I do not feel this is a mistake, as it obviously works for many people, I think I would have been better off going the "snake" route as it would have helped to push out even more air. 'kay once that's done, you let them sit for about 10 minutes. They will begin to rise slightly. Ideally, they will rise by about one-fourth volume... a technique called "half-proofing" the dough. By the time I had finished shaping my last bagel, my first bagels had sat for closer to 15 minutes. They did not rise by 1/4th volume. They easily doubled in size. Just shaped / On their way to raw bagel balloons Mistake No. 3 The next time I make these bagels, and I will, I will work with sections of the dough, keeping the unused dough in my fridge. I will only work with enough dough for about 4 bagels and I will shape them, let them sit for a few minutes and then throw them into their water "bath" to cook. I will not even touch the rest of the dough until those boiled bagels have been set on a clean towel to cool. Which brings me to - Mistake No. 3A Work in small batches (especially if you are baking these on a high humidity day) from the shaping to the boiling steps. Not only did my bagels "half proof" way longer than they should before hitting the boiling water, but they proofed MUCH TOO LONG after that as they were sitting there getting bigger and bigger on my counter waiting for their turn in the water.. Small batches, kids.. small batches. Another thing to keep in mind is - once your bagels hit the boiling water, they should drop to the bottom of the pot and then slowly and "gracefully" (hee!) rise to the top. The recipe says if they do not sink and only float, you will get a more "bready" bagel. Mine were all floaters - and I don't know why that is.. maybe it's because I didn't get out enough air? I have no idea. But my bagels did not turn out more "bready" regardless. hehee Wrinkly prune-like floaters / Sad, sad mf'in bagel like blobs From the boiling water, you set them on clean towels and once they are cool enough to handle you transfer them to a cookie sheet that has been dusted with corn meal. It's at this point where you can add your toppings if you so desire. I desired. I made 1/2 doz. plain, then 3 sesame, 6 with sun-dried tomato, roasted garlic and fresh basil and 6 brushed with a pear/cinnamon jelly that I melted and topped with cinnamon sugar. (as if I could go all savory!) Mistake No. 4 Only use toppings that won't burn to lil charcoal crisps. Sun-dried tomatoes and fresh basil will turn into charred pieces of squickiness when baked on top of a bagel - next time, they'll go in the dough! (we weren't allowed to add anything to the bagel dough on our first batch, to keep them in check with the Real Honest Jewish Purist people, but we could go crazy on subsequent batches that I just didn't get to yet) Behold! My bevy of Bageljacks! All crispy on the outside, chewy and warm on the inside - fresh from the oven.. SO GOOD. Unfortunately, the next day they were so rubbery that I couldn't even pull a piece off to gnaw on. So I had to chuck them. Hubbs, the omniscient baking God (he can barely toast bread) said it was because I stored them in ziplock plastic bags over night and that I should have just left them out. I dunno, maybe he was right.. course I won't be admitting that to him anytime soon. *evil gril* And so it is with mucho grande thanks to Jenny and Freya for hosting a fabulous challenge! And to all my fellow DB friends - your unwaning support is the ONLY THING that gets me through some of these challenges.. I thank you kindly. =) 'kay.. git! Go check out everyone else's posts! There are plenty to see - we keep growing bigger and better with each and every passing month! xoxo