Let It Snow, I Don’t Care…

Today, we had our first big snowfall of the season. It’s officially winter in the Not-So-Great-White-North, and I couldn’t care less. Now, I’m not one of those people that gripes with every changing season, constantly wishing that the weather was doing the opposite of what it is, counting down the days until the next season change because of course, then it will be better! No sir, not me. Well that’s a lie; I hate summer. But since it is anything BUT summer, I digress.

I actually like winter. Not so much being outside in the winter, but watching outside from inside in the winter with a big bowl of something warm. I like watching the snow fall, making stews and soups, and wearing woolen leg-warmers, fingerless gloves and hats inside with a mug of peppermint tea. I’ve even been, on occasion, known to actually bring myself outside and careen down a mountain strapped to a thin piece of fiberglass just to be able to warm up afterwards. It’s mostly about the cooking, though.

To celebrate the beginning of what I hope to be a white yet mild winter, I made a pot of soup. One of my classmates is partially to blame for this, actually, for if it wasn’t for her buying a bowl of potato, bacon and cheddar soup on our break today, I probably never would have gotten the idea to make my own at home. But she did, and I did, and this is me telling you about it. Onward and upward.

I don’t make soups too often. It’s not because I dont’ like to or want to, but because I tend to disregard them as actual meals. In my mind, a meal should have a meat and a vegetable, maybe a starch, and all of these things should need to be chewed. Soup just doesn’t follow those rules(let it be known that I don’t eat broth soups with chunks of such things floating within so stop thinking you’re so clever) and that’s why I don’t think about it. However, on rare occasions, I do infact crave soup, and when I do, it’s 95% of the time a cream soup. This is perfect for the little autistic kid in me that NEEDS a meal to have a meat, vegetable and maybe a starch because lo and behold, it does! And it’s all suspended in a delicious, creamy veloute. Who could ask for more?

Potato, Bacon and Cheddar Soup
Serves 4 as a starter, 2-3 as a main

5 slices of bacon, cut into strips
2/3 cup onion, fine dice
2 cloves garlic, fine dice
4 tbsp butter
3/4 cup flour(approx.)
2 cups chicken stock
2 cups 2% milk
2 cups potatoes, medium-small cubes
1 cup shredded old white cheddar
pinch each of cloves and nutmeg

Sautee bacon and onions until bacon has let off most of it’s fat into the pan and onions are translucent; add butter. Add garlic and sweat for 30 sec. Stir in flour to make a roux. Mixture should pull away from the pan. Slowly add chicken stock, stirring constantly. Once encorporated, stir in milk and add potatoes. Let simmer on medium-low for an hour, or until the potatoes are cooked through but are still pleasant to the bite. You will have to get up and stir this soup every so often as the roux DOES like to stick to the bottom of the pot, but that’s easy enough to fix by aggressive scraping with the spoon. Once the potatoes are cooked, check your seasoning and add cloves, nutmeg and pepper as needed. You probably won’t need to add any salt as the bacon will fix that for you but go nuts if you like to. I’m no one’s doctor. Add cheese and stir until melted.

Serve with crusty bread, soft snow and a warm pair of wool socks while pretending the world does not exist.

Currently listening to: City and Colour

Last Night’s Dinner, And Why I Hate Supermarket Butchers

Psst… Hey guess what? It’s root vegetable season! *Glee!* Fall has officially worked it’s way inside me, folks and it’s delicious! I finally got around to cleaning my kitchen and in celebration, I decided that it was befitting of me to destroy it all over again. It had been so long since I last cooked something more complicated than an egg and cheese sandwich that I almost forgot how much I simply love to cook. Really. That long. Well fret not, for I have seen the error of my ways and am now resolving to keep the battleground clean and cook at least one honest-to-goodness meal every week. For serious.

So let me tell you all about last night’s dinner. Remember how I’ve been spewing forth my love of all things autumn for the last, oh, four months? Well I finally got around to eating my season. With a cart full of turnips, butternut squash, parsnips, potatoes, pumpkin and celeriac, so began my journey. Down dried mushroom land, forward to expensive cheese land and with a quick pit stop to cut-up dead things land we were on our way to flavor country. Not before playing my favorite supermarket game though. It’s “Stump The Poor Checkout Lady” time! WEEEEEOOOO! It may make me sound like a horrible person, but one of my favorite parts of grocery shopping is getting to the checkout and enjoying the look of confusion and “what the fuck are you making, lady?” gazes that I get every time I try to buy my vegetables. Am I the only person in this town who eats this shit? Were I a more self-conscious person, I might start to develop a complex… The poor woman only got a 2/6; apparently parsnips and celery root aren’t excessively consumed in our fair city. Such is life, I suppose. So with my cart full of knobbly root vegetables and my soul satisfied with food-snobbery, I bid farewell to the supermarket and ran right home to begin The Chopping.

I’ve always really enjoyed doing vegetable cuts. It’s strange to most people and that I understand, but maybe it’s related to my love of garde-manger. Also, butchery. I hope it doesn’t sound to macabre, but I really do love butchery. I think I can chalk that one up to the little autistic kid inside of me that loves breaking things down into their proper parts and arranging them according to size and usage. Speaking of butchery, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s supermarket butchers. Really. If you’ve been properly trained your job really isn’t too hard. Break down the meat, follow the bones, clean the silver skin and cartilage off, package and label. Breaking down a chicken is one of the easiest things to accomplish in butchery, so why did the chicken parts I bought come with a spine? Hmmm? When I see “skin on, bone in” on a pack of chicken breasts, it damn well better come with a part of a wing bone and ZERO spine. Zero. Spine. Do your job, it’s not hard. Anyways…

So I’ve been anxious to try this for a while. Laying awake one night in the clutches of insomnia, I came up with a stuffed chicken idea. Turns out that I do all of my best thinking while I’m only half awake. Who’d have thought, huh? So was born the notion of wild mushroom stuffed chicken with bacon and gruyere. You heard me. Paired with a braise of my beloved fall underground dwellers it was the best part of a Sunday evening. Oh, you want to know how to make this do you? Well I suppose, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the “WFT?” looks you’ll get at the grocery store and the “OMG!” feeling you’ll get in your stomach when it’s all said and done.

Wild Mushroom Chicken and Braise of Fall Vegetables

For the chicken

2 bone in, skin on breasts of chicken
1 clove garlic, fine dice
2 shallots, fine dice
2 tbsp cooked bacon, diced*
1/4 cup dried mixed wild mushrooms**
1 cup chicken stock
1/2 cup grated gruyere cheese
2 tbsp olive oil, divided
2 tbsp butter, divided
1 tbsp herbs de provence
salt and pepper to taste

*do not use pre-packaged cooked bacon please. Just cook one strip and cut it up, mkay?
**you can buy mixed dried mushrooms. If your store doesn’t carry them, an even combination of porcini, portabello, oyster and shitake mushrooms will work.

For the vegetables

2 cups each of:
celeriac
parsnips
butternut squash
pumpkin
waxy white potatoes
turnips, all cut into one inch cubes
5 cloves garlic, smashed
6 tbsp olive oil
1.5 cups chicken stock
pinch of cloves
pinch of cinnamon
pinch of nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste

Start with your vegetables. Skin and chop your ingredients for the braise. Over medium heat, sautee vegetables until they begin to color. You will have to do this in sections and remember to not overcrowd your frying pan; use 1.5 tbsp oil per each batch or thereabouts. Transfer vegetables to your roasting pan. Deglaze frying pan with the chicken stock and simmer about 5 minutes. Stir in your spices and pour brazing liquid over vegetables. Put in a 300 degree oven and cook for approximately 2 hours, stirring occasionally. Use a wooden spoon to stir, or a rubber spatula so you don’t turn your lovely cubes of vegetables into lovely baby food. Eat with your eyes.
You will know when your vegetables are done when there’s no more liquid in the pan and they are firm but tender when pierced with a knife, or pleasant to the bite.

While your vegetables cook, start the stuffing for your chicken. Over medium heat in a small saucepan, sweat shallots and garlic in 1 tbsp each butter and olive oil until soft. Deglaze with stock and bring to a slight boil. Add your mushrooms and herbs and simmer for about 20 minutes or until mushrooms have re hydrated. Strain the liquid and reserve. Mix bacon in with mushroom mixture, set aside.
To clean your chicken: hopefully your butcher isn’t an idiot, or maybe you bought a whole chicken to carve yourself, but clean the breast off of the bone, leaving the skin intact and up to the first joint of the wing bone if you were so lucky as to get one. I wasn’t and for this I am sad. Remove the tender from the back of the breast and set aside. Make a cut down the middle of the back of the breast that goes about half way in. From this cut, cut into each side to make a pocket in which to stuff your stuffing. If you’ve made chicken kiev or cordon bleu before then it’s exactly like that. Stuff the breasts with your mushroom and bacon mixture and grated cheese. Place your reserved tender over the pocket and using any loose skin or meat, close the pocket so that you can not see the filling. It’s tricky but can be done, I promise. Heat remaining oil and butter in a pan over medium high heat and brown chicken breasts, starting with the skin side. It helps to hold them closed with tongs sometimes so that you don’t lose your cheese when the meat starts to expand and shrink the skin. Once all sides are browned, place in a 350 oven and cook until done.
Deglaze your chicken fry pan with the reserved mushroom liquid and reduce until thick. Add more stock if you need to, or white wine if you have any. I didn’t have any but wish I had. No bigs.

Serve chicken on a bed of your lovely vegetable braise and a drizzling of reduction sauce. Eat this in your pajamas while watching Sunday night cartoons with a big mug of chai tea. Or whatever else makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Current earmeats: Parkway Drive, and I Killed The Prom Queen. It’s been a week of hardcore for me.

Happy Monday!

Thanksgiving Comes Early In Canada, and Late On My Site.

Yep, there I go apologizing again. I should really just stop promising anything and then everyone would be happier, no? Well, sigh a sigh and let’s do carry on, shall we?

T.G.I.Fall, everyone. I was beginning to drown in ennui with the summer so much so that it was only a matter of time before I got so restless that spray-painting the leaves with fall colors was starting to sound like a good idea. Fall is my favorite time of year, by far. Take all of your long summer nights, your days at the beach, your ice cream and snow cones, you can have them! Give me a crisp autumn day with the crunch of dead leaves at my feet, a big scarf and some fingerless mittens, a braise of squashes and root vegetables and you’ll have one mighty happy lil’ tattooed girl.

What I love most about fall, like any true fan of food, is, well, the food. I wait impatiently for half a year every year to taste the fruits of of the fall, and as a large fan of vegetables and pastries, this is a most painful wait. So when I’m asked to create something with one of these most tasty fall fares, I am agog with excitement. This thanksgiving, I was charged with the duty of The Pie. Squee! And how I do love to make pumpkin pie, let me tell you. We had made a few in class the week before(oh, did I forget to mention that I’m now studying to become a pastry chef? We are much happier now that chef training is done, folks. Much. Happier.) but I didn’t like the recipe, and that’s fine, but I chose not to document it. I like my pies a certain way: rich and boozy, and the pies that we made at school just weren’t up to my standards. But I digress.

I think I’ve yammered on enough for now about pretty much nothing, so I’ll just get to it and give you the recipe for MY pumpkin pie, and in my very biased opinion, the better one. Ahem.

Bunny’s Boozy Pumpkin Pie
Serves 8 comfortably, 12 gingerly.

2 cups of pure pumpkin puree
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
3 eggs
3 tbsp fancy molasses
1 tbsp cinnamon, or more. It won’t kill you.*
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/3 tsp cloves
1/3 tsp ginger
3 tbsp(one airplane bottle) orange liquer
1 cup 35% cream

One pie crust shell, uncooked.

*that I’m aware of…

Whisk together pumpkin, brown sugar and molasses. Whisk in the eggs one at a time. Add spices and liquer. Whisk in cream. Pour into your pie shell and cook at 400 degrees for ten minutes, then drop down to 350 for 20-30 minutes, or until the middle of the pie just barely jiggles when you move it, and the crust is golden brown.

Serve with spiced sweet whipped cream, if you bought more than was recommended. Buy the 500 ml carton, it’s better with whipped cream. Honest. Whip one cup of cream with 1/2 cup or less confectioner’s sugar(to your taste) and spice with cinnamon to taste. Tah dah!

In other news: I have fallen ill! NOOOO! It’s true, I’m afraid, I have become victim to The Sick and am taking it like a wimp. Also: my kitchen never ceases to be dirty though I haven’t been cooking very much in my own home. Strange. Will investigate this further.

Earmeats: Rancid, and the general chatter of coffee shop patrons.

Banana Caramel Sauce

It occurs to me that if I am to remain sans internet, I will spend every week apologizing to you all from my connection at school. This shall not stand! As of sometime this week(fingers crossed), I will officially become a slave to Big Internet, suck it up and buy some. As I live and breathe, my mission in life was to get by without having to pay for it, be it by loitering in coffee shops, at school, or wherever there was a “Free WiFi” sign, but no more. I heave a sigh of defeat.

On a sweeter note, I am pleased to present you with a recipe for banana caramel sauce. I made this at my father’s on the same weekend in which I made the butter tarts of yore, but this recipe got swept aside in lieu of the wedding cake post. Here I go apologizing again. Without further preamble, do let’s begin.

Banana Caramel Sauce
Adapted from MarthaStewart.com

1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup cream
1 banana, sliced

Melt sugar in a saucepan over medium heat with one tablespoon of water. Brush down sides of pot as needed with water. When sugar is a light amber color, stir in butter. Once incorporated, stir in cream off of the heat. Mixture will bubble up a bit, but be not afraid, this is normal. When you have a beautiful, creamy caramel sauce, stir in bananas until sauce coats them. Serve over ice cream, cake, whatever.

In other news: math class continues to be a patronizing waste of 3000$. Awesome.

Currently feasting my ears on: Every Time I Die in one ear and my math teacher in the other, though my heart really isn’t concerned with the latter.

Nevermind Curling; Butter Tarts Are A Canadian Institution.

In America, there are no such things as butter tarts. You might get close with a pecan hand pie, but they don’t even come close. These are no mere shrunken pecan pies. A flaky pastry crust holds in a gooey, sweet, buttery filling that oozes out and explodes on your tongue with pure pastry ecstasy. Please don’t just take my word for it, make these ASAP. NOW. Immediately, as in THIS SECOND. GO!

I hope pie crust isn’t something that gives you people the fear. After all these years of public exposure and tutorials on the Food Network, on blogs, in magazines, it pains me to hear that some people are still afraid of making their own crusts. It is SO easy, and I would never lie to you. Especially about something as serious as pie crust. Honest injun.

I’m not going to tell you how to make crust, but I will give you the recipe at the end of this post. If you don’t already know how to make a successful crust, Google it. I will say, though, that I love making mini pies of any kind. They are just so fun to make. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I’m fascinated by making any kind of individual dessert, especially in miniature.

Butter tarts are no exception; pushing little rounds of pastry into muffin tins and smoothing them out like perfect little pies just fills me with glee. GLEE! Really. But enough about me, because this show is really all about the filling.

It couldn’t be easier to make. The hardest thing you have to do is melt butter. F’reals. Everything just gets whisked together and you pour it into your cute little pastry cups, like such:

If you want to throw in some walnuts, pecans, or raisins, put them in the cups first, otherwise they’ll just float on top and no one wants that. Remember to soak your raisins in hot water though to plump them up so they don’t taste like little tumors. Or you can just leave them plain, to experience the awesomeness of the butter tart experience in all of it’s ooey, gooey glory. Yup yup.

Action shot! Because they’ll disappear just as fast as you made them. Please heed my warning though– you WILL become addicted to these, they WILL cause you to up a dress size, and you WON’T be able to stop making them because everyone that tastes one will demand more, more, more! Print several copies of this recipe and keep it with you at all times as you will most definitely get tired of writing it out every time someone demands it. Yeeeeeooooooo! Recipe to follow.

Butter Tarts
Makes 12

Crust

1 lb lard
5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp vinegar, in a 1cup measure, and fill with cold water

Cut lard into flour and salt until it resembles small peas. You can use two knives for this, or a pastry cutter. Add water and vinegar preparation, mixing with a spoon or by hand. Once almost combined, turn it on to a floured counter top and work it until it comes together smoothly. Separate dough into two masses, and form them into 1 inch thick discs. Wrap them in cling wrap and refrigerate for an hour.

Filling

1/2 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup corn syrup
2 eggs
pinch of salt

Whisk all ingredients together. Just like that. Tah dah!

Heat oven to 375.
Roll out pastry crust to about 1/4 inch thickness. With a large circular cutter, cut them into 12 rounds. You might have to roll them thinner just to get them to fill the muffin tins up to the edges, but that’s just fine. I do it, it’s cool. With a shot glass, press the rounds into muffin cups and flatten out any of the overlapping crust so that you have a smooth wall. Rinse and repeat.
If making butter tarts with nuts or raisins, use about one teaspoon of whatever you’re using and put them in the pastry now. Once that’s done, pour the filling into the cups.
Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until the crust is baked and the filling only jiggles slightly when you shake the trays. I highly recommend putting your muffin tins on a baking sheet as the filling tends to bubble up and spill over. Unless you like cleaning your oven, then go ahead and put them in as they are.
Hard as it may be, wait until they are absolutely cool before eating. Not only is this for your safety, but the filling will not set properly until it is cooled off. If you do not heed this warning, the filling will be too loose and will drip down your face, onto your pants, and you’ll look like a kindergarten kid. Just trust me, m’kay?

In other news: It took me three weeks to write this post. Not “I made them three weeks ago and now my lazy ass got around to telling you about it” three weeks, but more like “I started this post three weeks ago at a cafe but the internet crapped out on me so I’ve had to keep my computer on so I wouldn’t lose my work until I could get to another connection” three weeks. Which didn’t even matter anyways, because when I finally DID get a connection(at the college, thank science), I tried to save the post just in case something happened, and the damn thing ERASED it on me. So I had to start all over again. Lesson of the day: BACK. SHIT. UP. OFFLINE.

Also: Wedding cake status: Baked. I now have 50lbs of vanilla cake in my freezer, patiently waiting for Thursday, when I will cover it with icing. I am very proud of this.

Current earmeats: NERD.

Cupcakes and Apologies

It’s been quite a long few weeks for me. I’ve been busy(WHAT!?), I got a new job, and my upstairs neighbor moved and took my stolen internet with him. Now I either have to suck it up and pay for the stuff or continue to use the free wireless connection at the coffee shop downtown. Life is so hard. But in that time of doing nothing and everything, I did manage to bake a sample batch of cupcakes as a tasting point for the wedding cake I’ll be making in September. So life is sweet, too.

My instructions from the bride were, almost exactly as follows: “I want a vanilla cake with vanilla icing. It needs to be so sweet it will rot your teeth on the first bite.” This is exactly what I delivered. Now personally, I’m not much of a fan of vanilla-on-vanilla cupcakes. I find them bland and boring. When presented with a choice, I will almost always go for the lonely group of cupcakes that everyone is afraid to taste because the flavor combinations seem too strange for human consumption. This usually pays off for me, as what may not sound like a good idea on paper winds up being something that pays off HUGE on the tongue, with some rare exceptions too horrendous to mention.

Well, these are the vanilla cupcakes to love. Some might find this a little hard to believe, but as a rule, I’m not much of a fan of cupcakes. For the most part, I find them incredibly dry and difficult to swallow. I’m more of a cake fan, because even the most arid of cakes can be corrected with a generous brushing of cleverly flavored simple syrup and a most heaping slathering of decadent icing. These though, I didn’t mind. I’m more of a fan of this recipe in cake form, but as cupcakes they were inoffensive and delicious. Stay tuned in just short of a month, wherein I will be documenting my forays in wedding cakery, but for now, I’ll hook you up with the cupcake recipe, as I’m sure you’re all dying to sink a greedy tooth into one. Your dentist will love me.

Vanilla Cupcakes
Makes 12
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and grease up your muffin tins.
Cream together softened butter and sugar. One at a time, add the eggs, making sure they are well incorporated after each addition. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Stir vanilla into buttermilk. Alternating flour and buttermilk mixtures, add them to butter mixture. It should go flour, milk, flour, milk, flour, milk. ALWAYS end with milk, people. IMPERATIVE. Bake for 30-40 minutes.
Vanilla Icing

1/4 c butter
2 c powdered sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla

Combine butter, powdered sugar, salt and vanilla. Add milk as needed to thin to spreadable consistency. Tint to your liking, or not at all. Slather on cupcakes, or wherever you need a little more butter and sugar in your life.

In other news: my kitchen hasn’t been cleaned in three weeks. I am not even the least bit concerned by this.

Currently listening to: Batmobile.

Raw Pasta Puttanesca

Sometimes, I just don’t feel like cooking. Especially in the summer. Common sense will eventually step in and remind me that it’s probably not a good idea to sit there with my laziness and starve so I better turn on the oven, but sometimes I punch common sense right in the face with ideas. Take that, common sense! Think you’re so smart, I’ll show you…

I’ve been toying with the idea of going “half-raw” for a while. I doubt that that’s the technical term. I like the idea of the raw food movement, but I’m still quite attached to certain things. Like my stove… Pies… Steak… Cheese… I could go on for days. So, though I like the general idea behind raw food, I’m just not ready(nor do I think I ever will be) to give up all the tasty things that are allowed in a normal person’s diet. So I’m gonna phone it in and go half-raw. As much as I can. I will have my cheese and eat it too.

Tonight, I decided to test the waters and stick my toe into the shallow end of the raw food pool. I’ve heard of similar dishes to the one I made-zucchini “pastas” are quite plentiful in the raw foodist’s recipe roladex-but I haven’t seen them with much more than just tomatoes and celery thrown in a blender. Well, that just doesn’t cut it for us here at Rockaberry. Boring is NOT the new black, and I demand a certain level of taste and excitement in my food. Especially vegetable dishes, which I am honestly not too fond of with the absence of heat. However, this dish exceeded my expectations. I can’t possibly begin to explain how good it was except for to say that I would have run to the grocery store for another zucchini had it been open because I wasn’t ready to let go of the experience. See for yourself! Recipe to follow.

Also: The house beside my building was on fire, again, this evening, reaffirming my desire to move. And for some reason, it made me crave Fritos. Interesting…

Raw Pasta Puttanesca
Serves one.

1 Zucchini
3 Campari tomatoes(or other medium-small tomatoes)
3 sun-dried tomatoes, the dry kind not oil packed
3 kalamata olives, pitted
1 tbsp olive oil
3 basil leaves
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of red pepper flakes
1 tbsp crumbled feta(optional if you’re a true raw foodie. I’m attached to my cheese)
dash of cayenne

Soak sundried tomatoes and bay leaf in boiling water for ten mintues. Using a vegetable peeler, peel the zucchini into strips, all of it. Cut the strips lenghwise into a long julienne. Drain the tomatoes and discard the bay leaf, reserving about 1 tbsp of the water. Place all ingredients into blender except(!) zucchini and feta. Blend until smooth, adding reserved water to thin if needed. Top zucchini with blended sauce, and sprinkle with feta. Best enjoyed while gawking like a yokel at a burning building, or possibly while watching So You Think You Can Dance, if you happen not to be lucky enough to have a towering inferno to gape at.

Sidebar: why aren’t firemen attractive in real life? Oh Hollywood, will the lies never cease? *Sigh*

Chunky Guacamole Shrimp Salad

For those of you who don’t know, I have a small obsession with tomato/avocado combinations. I put them on burgers, make sandwiches out of them, dip my nachos in them, and now I’ve harnessed their awesomeness in salad form.

I’m a little backwards sometimes. For the most part, when people are on a tight budget they cut back on their food choices and lean more towards nonperishables or starches, and when their fridge is empty on those days before grocery day, it usually houses condiments, milk, maybe eggs, and preserves. I, however, end up with an odder mish-mash of exotic vegetable scraps, fruits and cheeses. Like today, for example. Tomorrow is grocery day for me, and all I have in my fridge right now is buttermilk, olives, half of each an avocado, red onion, lemon and tomato, onion sprouts, feta cheese, some limp cilantro, and a laundry list of condiments. Though it may be harder to make a meal out of a combination of those things than say eggs, bread and cheese, I’m never discouraged. And have I mentioned yet that I LOVE tomato and avocado?

The only rational thing to do then was pounce upon them and fuse them together, yet again. But with what? I have no bread, no nachos, no burgers. I do, however, have feta, half a red onion, shrimp, and enough condiments to make any kind of dressing I can muster. So was born this guacamole salad. It was really refreshing, the kind of thing that you would want to eat outside. If it hadn’t have been for my guttersnipe of a downstairs neighbor, I just might have. Either way, this one is going into my frequent rotation for sure. Recipe to follow.

Chunky Guacamole Shrimp Salad
Serves one

13 peeled, deveined large shrimp
1/2 avocado, cut roughly
1/2 tomato, seeded and chopped into medium-sized chunks
1 slice of red onion, cut in half(sorry I don’t have a more accurate measurement)
1 tbsp feta cheese, crumbled

Dressing

Juice of half a lemon
1/4 tsp dijon mustard
pinch of salt
pinch of cumin
pinch of ancho chili powder
1 1/2 tbsp garlic olive oil

Poach shrimp for 3 minutes, drain and cool. Make dressing: whisk together lemon juice, dijon, and seasonings. Whisk in oil to emulsify. Toss shrimp with salad ingredients and dressing using spoons(I’m serious! Forks will turn it into an ugly mash.)

Also, here is a picture of the inside of yesterday’s strawberry cake. It tasted even better than it looked, and I am now quite high on my own sense of accomplishment. Please excuse my friend’s arm.

Icing A Cake In the Devil’s Kitchen

As I promised, I am now pleased to present you with my tale of strawberry cake. If it was novel, it would probably be called “The Strawberry Cake Catastrophe.” This was quite possibly one of the most incredibly problematic endeavors to date, but true to fashion I managed to turn it around with maximum wreckage of my kitchen and only minor damages to my pride.

It started off innocently enough. Just a pint of unassuming organic strawberries. The kitchen window was open and I was [hopefully]annoying my downstairs neighbor with Amy Winehouse playing on my stereo. The cats were doing cat things and not investigating what was going on on the counter(for once), and the future was looking fresh and full of sweet possibility.

At this point, the mess in my kitchen was minor. Just the things I was using were laying around and there were a few glops of batter and buttermilk on the counter but it wasn’t anything too overwhelming. Let me take a minute here though to tell you about those strawberries. If you are one of the unfortunate souls that has yet to try an organic summer strawberry I suggest you make it of the highest priority. They are only a dollar extra than generic strawberries and they don’t taste like red foam. If you want an approximation of their superiority, let me tell you that in all seriousness they almost brought me to tears they were so good, and I actually scavenged the cut tops for any edible portion I could find like some kind of shameless hobo in my own house. Remember when you were younger and everything tasted so… different? This is where your flavors have been all along and right under your frugal nose, instead of hidden behind a blanket of pesticides and genetic engineering. But enough about that; this post is about cake after all!

With the berries safely folded into the cake batter, so began my two hours of relaxation whilst they baked away. Well, maybe more like one hour and forty-five minutes rather, since I only have one eight-inch springform and have to swap it out for new batter if I’m making a layer cake. It’s a minor inconvenience, but at least it’s one less dish. Yeah, well, this “minor inconvenience” was the beginning of a tumultuous roll downhill and a very long and agonizing climb back to the top. I have no pictures of the catastrophic part of this misadventure as I was far too busy scrambling about the kitchen trying to salvage the numerous things that went wrong. Frankly, the carnage is far too graphic and disturbing to subject human eyes to, but I will list the battles fought and casualties lost. Just humor me.

The Tragic Misjudgment of Angles-In which our brave General Cupcake blazed forth to conquer the enemy but was defeated by underestimating the power of the lowlands. Next time shall attack from higher ground and jerry-rig some form of cake stand rather than my inferior(and awkwardly low, actually) counter tops. Casualties: four unlevel cake layers and the General’s ego in matters of horizontal slicing.

The Jellyfrost Incident- In which the General, freshly wounded from battle but not discouraged, tackles the guerrillas from both Camp Strawberry Jam and Camp Strawberry Buttercream in a diplomatic attempt to unite the two. Unfortunately the ramifications of the Tragic Misjudgment of Angles were unaccounted for and after a long and arduous battle the General did succeed in uniting the two opposing camps in a fragile cease-fire. However there was still much propaganda to be distributed to assure the rebels that Angles had been rectified so our General marched on, weary from a battle barely won but optimistic nonetheless. Casualties: none.

The Buttercream War- The longest, hardest and most fatiguing of all was the Buttercream War. After what was a shaky accord at best with the two guerrilla camps trying to coexist on their ravaged homeland, a mission of complete unity and democracy was enthusiastically set in to motion. Perhaps it was General Cupcake’s zeal in attempting to all at once solve the perplexity of the tenuous relations of her enemies by binding them together and to also salvage some of her own pride that caused an all-out war in the land of Strawberrycakeistan. The lethal combination of weapons too strong for her control, battle fatigue and impatient fervor caused the General to agree to a full-on Buttercream Blitz. The weapon was too strong, foreign and applied with far too much pressure for the people of Strawberrycakeistan to understand that an all-out riot erupted, causing the entire top of the country to split in half. Frazzled and frightened, the General did the first thing she could think of and closed the borders of the entire country, sealing it shut with a metal wall until it resolved it’s own issues. Casualties: the entire kitchen cavalry, the Dishwater Ocean, and the General’s patience.

As you can all see, things are once again all well in the world of cake. For those of you with less vivid imaginations than myself, basically what happened was: I couldn’t cut the cake in half properly because I am too tall for my counters. This presented problems when the time came for gluing them together, and especially when it came to covering the cake. I actually had to clamp the springform ring around the whole thing, ICED, and shove it into the fridge for an hour-long time out to think about what it had done. I made a new batch of icing, because of some kind or serendipity I actually had over purchased and had enough for another batch, so I re-frosted the entire thing. With much more success as you can see. This, thankfully, concluded my troubles but has taught me that trying to frost a cake in 30 degree humidity, in an apartment still recovering from the effects of an oven being on for two hours, with unlevel cake layers, wins me the “You Sure Aren’t Some Kind Of Stephen Hawking” award. Best to be eaten with a slice of humble pie, I’m sure. Moving on…

So begins the decorative part of our program. Though my hand mixer was struggling in its old age to keep up with my demands(it’s probably older than I am, I learned how to bake cakes with that thing when I was seven!), it grumpily made one more batch of icing, royal icing to be exact. Much to my surprise, piping the cake in the Devil’s Kitchen wasn’t at all difficult. I assumed that the heat would have fought against my attempts to defy gravity and pipe on the vertical side of the cake, ending in far worse tragedy than I could ever imagine but it just wasn’t so, people. I drew up a template of the flourish that I wanted to cover with to serve as a visual aid and went to town. It turned out almost as well as I had hoped. I would have preferred the cake to have been higher to allow for a smaller line, but at that point we weren’t about to nitpick.

I was going to document my forays into gumpaste, but honestly, I do it often enough and could provide far better demonstrations with more ornate decorations at another time, so this is what you get for now. I did these the night before while watching old musicals and drinking the iced tea and it was great. Now, this is what i do before i shove them into a cake, and what i recommend that anyone else do as well. I arrange them in a way in which i would like to see them on a cake and take a picture of it. That way, you don’t lose your arrangement and can refer to the picture if you don’t remember where you wanted a particular piece to go. Call it organized, call it anal, call it what you want, but I’m going to call it a solid plan.

And that would be that! All that was left was to shove the stems into the cake and pipe the accents on to the strawberries and the topper…

Ready for it?

There you are, my friend Mel’s birthday cake. Calamities aside, it turned out alright if I may say so myself. Apparently my icing penmanship leaves something to be desired, but I can live with that today. I’ve emerged from this quite humbled actually. I love decorating cakes and rarely have disasters that I can’t recover from, but today I am thankful for my disasters. If everything went smoothly all the time, how would we ever learn? Because of these events, I’ve learned that not all cakes are best to be worked with completely fresh, jam and buttercream can indeed be coaxed into friendship if you’re persistent enough, and always keep your pointy cake toppers away from your cats lest you want them to gnaw off the fragile shards(which I now have to somehow repair). Recipe to follow.

Strawberry Cake

3 cups all purpose flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1 cup salted butter, room temperature
2 cups sugar
5 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups buttermilk

1 pint strawberries, medium dice
2 tbsp flour

With an electric mixer or stand mixer, whip butter until light and fluffy at medium speed, about 5 minutes. Gradually add the sugar in about 6 additions, and then add each egg one at a time until incorporated.
Sift together flour and baking powder and alternate with with buttermilk and vanilla until blended.
Toss strawberries in 2 tbsp of flour and add to mixture. (The flour assures that the strawberries will adhere to the batter and will incorporate more easily.) Fold the strawberries into the batter.
Pour mixture into two 8″ cake pans and bake for 40-55 minutes at 350, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
Cool cakes on a wire rack. I suggest wrapping them thrice in saran and freezing them for at least half a day to sturdy them up before finishing them. I will be doing this next time, as well as investing in a tall, tall cake stand.

Icing and filling

1/2 cup salted butter, softened
1/2 cup strawberry preserves(mash them through a sieve if you don’t want the seeds appearing in your icing)
4 cups confectioner’s sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
Milk, for thinning, if needed

1/2 cup strawberry preserves

On medium speed, whip butter until fluffy. Whip in 1/2 cup strawberry preserves. Gradually add confectioner’s sugar until desired consistency is reached. Thin with milk if you find the icing too thick.

Cut each cake in half horizontally. Microwave 1/2 cup strawberry preserves until spreadable and with a pastry brush(or a spoon, I’m sure it will also work). Spread a thin amount of frosting on the bottom layer of the cake(and when I say thin, I MEAN IT. Unless you make twice the icing, in which case go nuts.) Brush some preserves on to the layer that will crown the bottom layer and place it on so that the side with the preserves is on the frosted layer. Do this with the other layers until you reach the top. Cover your cake with remaining frosting. Decorate as you wish, in a much cooler kitchen than mine, I hope.

For extra strawberry power, I would also suggest using another pint of strawberries, cutting them into slices, and putting them between the layers of cake. Strawberry kawaii!

A Tuna Sandwich To Love

Despite her offensively large head and gratuitous cleavage, Giada Di Laurentiis does sometimes have some good ideas. When she’s not overly groping her food, she can come up with some tasty foodstuffs. When I was watching my mom’s house this weekend and overloading on the glories of cable TV, I came across this recipe and immediately bookmarked it in my brain. Now, I am not usually a fan of tuna sandwiches as I am appalled by the idea of canned meats but that doesn’t stop me from buying fresh tuna and cooking it myself. Tossed with a small jar of preserved artichokes and a handful of kalamata olives and drizzled with some olive oil, it was heaven on focaccia. Recipe to follow.

Also, stay tuned for this weekend’s strawberry cake. I have a birthday to attend, and science forbid I show up sugarless.

Currently rocking out to the queen of Rockabilly, miss Wanda Jackson. Twaaaang-a-laaang…

Tuna, Artichoke and Olive Salad, adapted from Giada Di Laurentiis.
Makes 2 servings

One medium-sized tuna filet
One small jar of quartered artichokes(approx. 1/3 cup)
10 kalamata olives, or similar olives
2 tbsp olive oil

Season tuna with salt and pepper(or nothing, if you wish) and bake in the oven at 350 until cooked through and tender, but not dry. Cool.
Break up tuna in a bowl until roughly flaked. Roughly chop artichokes into manageable pieces. Pit and chop olives. Toss ingredients together with tuna and olive oil. Proceed to pack on to focaccia or your bun of choice. Please do not ruin this lovely sandwich with regular white bread, it’s in your best interest, honest.