Category: Cooking

Anya’s 4th Birthday Cake

This year, I made a banana caramel cake for Anya’s birthday. She assembled her own cake & put the candles on it – messy, but she had a lot of fun. I’d have done more dulce de leche if it wasn’t melting the whipped cream. I made it in the pressure cooker – 15 mins on high @ about 10AM, let the whole thing sit until we made the cake. Microwaving the caramel enough to get it pourable made it too hot to be near the whipped cream. So we spread the caramel on the cake, let that cool a bit, then spread out the cream and topped it with bananas.

Chocolate Chip Butter Cake

Ingredients:

    • 3 cups cake flour, plus more for dusting the pans
    • 3 teaspoons baking powder
    • 1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for coating the pans
    • 2 cups granulated sugar
    • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
    • 4 large eggs
    • 2 large egg yolks
    • 1 cup sour cream
    • 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
    • 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Method:

  1. Preheat to 350 F.
  2. Coat three 8″ round cake pans with butter. Line the bottoms of the pans with a circle of parchment paper. Lightly butter the parchment. Dust with flour.
  3. Sift the flour and baking powder together.
  4. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, beat the butter, sugar, and salt on medium-high speed until lightened and fluffy. Add the eggs and yolks 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Scrape down the sides of the bowl a few times while beating.
  5. Remove the bowl from the mixer. Add half of the sifted dry ingredients and beat by hand until combined. Beat in the sour cream and vanilla. Add the remaining dry ingredients and the chocolate chips, beating until combined.
  6. Divide the batter among the pans .
  7. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cakes comes out clean, about 20 minutes.
  8. Set the pans on a wire rack to cool for about 10 minutes. Invert the cakes onto the racks, peel off the parchment, and let cool before frosting.

Whipped cream — mix 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream, 2 tbsp maple syrup, and 1 1/2 tsp vanilla. Whip until firm peak stage.

Dulce de leche — Pour one can of sweetened condensed milk into a canning jar. Place lid on jar and lightly screw on. Place canning jar in the pressure cooker pot and add enough water to come about halfway up the side. Pressure cook on high for 40 minutes followed by a fifteen minute natural steam release. Remove jar from pressure cooker and allow to cool for another ten minutes. Open jar and stir to smooth out the caramel.

 

Assembling the cake — take a cake, cover in caramel, top with whipped cream, add slices of bananas, and then add another cake. I sliced off the domes of each cake to ensure the whole thing was relatively flat and stable.

Stollen

Another entry in my “fruit cakes and breads do not suck” series – Christmas stollen. It’s coated in powdered vanilla sugar. We made a vanilla stout a few years ago — and I pulled out the vanilla husks, poured some white sugar into a container, and mixed the husks into it. Those vanilla husks are still making a vanilla flavored/scented sugar. To make castor sugar, you can just throw a cup or two of sugar into a blender (make sure it has a glass container, the sugar will scratch plastic) and blend for a minute or two. This is *not* a replacement for commercial powdered sugar – that’s a blend of corn starch and finely ground sugar.

Anya really enjoyed this bread (probably because of the sugar coating!)

Mead Tasting!!

We siphoned our mead with the 47b yeast into a new container and pulled some out for Christmas dinner. It is really good – a slightly sweet young tasting white wine. We’ve got a gallon left that we’re going to let age. I’m hoping the 71b batches are this good.

Penguin Snacks

While looking for a healthy snack for Anya’s preschool Christmas party, I came across quite a few cute but not-for-bunches-of-kids snacks. One of them was penguins made of olives, cream cheese, and carrots. The not-kid-friendly part was the toothpick that holds the whole thing together. Well … turns out you can make them without toothpicks. Don’t move them afterward, walk softly … and there is a lot of intricacy that means I’m not making enough for a party tray. But Anya loved having half a dozen little penguin snacks to munch on today.

Use a small olive and a jumbo olive. Slice a section from the jumbo olive. Roll cream cheese into an oblong shape & stuff into the olive. Slice a carrot into circles, and cut a small triangle from each circle. Set the stuffed jumbo olive on the carrot circle. Put the carrot triangle into the small olive, smear a little cream cheese on the ‘neck’ part of the small olive, then stick it onto the jumbo olive. Voila, one penguin.

Fruity Cakes and Breads

It’s the time of year when Americans make fun of fruitcake … which, having seen the strange brick-shaped thing studded with something that claims to be candied fruit … yeah, that thing sucks. But real fruitcake and other breads with real candied fruit/peel are incredible. I’ve got a bunch of fruit and peel candied and have been making breads.

This panettone got scorched at the bottom – I think it was the tin on which I set the baking paper. I’ll use something else next time.

Christmas Healthy Snack For Preschool

Not sure why no one seems to sign up to provide the healthy snack for Anya’s preschool parties … I guess it’s not as much fun as providing the unhealthy snack that you know everyone is going to love. We’ve been volunteering; and it’s an opportunity to find interesting, festive, but still healthy snacks. For the Christmas party, we made pita trees. I found them on the Betty Crocker web site.

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These are pitas cut in sixths (pie-shaped wedges). They are topped with a spinach hummus and finely diced red pepper (we’ve made them with multi-color peppers, tomatoes, carrot shreds … basically any colorful combination of vegetables). A thin pretzel stick is inserted into the bottom to make trunk – but leave that to the last minute, otherwise you have soggy pretzels! You cannot pick them up by the trunk, although pretty much every kid tried.

Spinach Hummus Recipe

1/4c tahini
1/4c fresh lemon juice,
About a cup of dry garbanzo beans
Package of frozen spinach (thawed)

Pressure cook the garbanzo beans for 45 minutes on the high pressure (yes, that’s massively overcooked – I get a much smoother hummus by overcooking the beans), then allow to cool. Blend the tahini and lemon juice in a food processor until it is smooth. Add the drained garbanzo beans and run the processor until smooth. Squeeze the spinach to dry it out, then slowly add to the hummus and blend to combine. I was going for color – I wanted a bright green.

Pumpkin Pie Recipe

We made some pumpkin pies yesterday – one of which is for Anya’s preschool “Feast”. I wanted a lightly sweetened, creamy, pumpkin pie. The recipe makes two *deep* dish pies (the Emile Henry ruffled pie plate)

Ingredients – Pie:

58 oz tinned pumpkin puree

36 oz whole milk, simmered down to half

4 oz cream

6 eggs

9 T Penzey’s pumpkin pie spice

1/4 cup blackstrap molasses

Incredients – Crust:

16 oz gingersnap cookies (make sure they are good gingersnaps)

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

2 T flour

2 T sugar

Ingredients – Apple Caramel:

2 cups apple cider

Method: Preheat oven to 425.

Making the pie crust – run the ginger snaps through a food processor to make a sandy powder. Mix in the flour and sugar. Melt the butter and add to the crumbs. Make sure the mixture is moist enough to compress into a crust. If it isn’t add another tablespoon of butter. Press the mixture along the bottom and sides of the pie plates. Bake crust at 425 for five minutes, then set aside to cool while you mix the pumpkin filling.

Making the pie – Combine the milk, cream, and eggs and whip together. Whip in the spices and molasses. Fold this into the pumpkin puree. Gently transfer the pumpkin mixture into the cooled pie crusts. Bake for fifteen minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 350 and bake for 50 minutes. Remove pies from oven and allow to cool for several hours (if you pierce the pie to test it, it is apt to crack … I made two pies so I was able to test one and have an un-cracked pie for the party).

Making the Apple Caramel – Put apple cider into a pan on high heat. Boil, stirring constantly, until it is almost all evaporated and very foamy. Remove from burner and let it sit a few minutes to cool. It will thicken as it cools.

Ramen Noodles

I found a recipe for alkaline noodles — well, Scott had been craving ramen noodles. And I cannot say I know where to get them. The Styrofoam bowls with paper covers that you peel back and add water … it’s been a while since I’ve been to CAM (Cleveland Asia Market), but I totally know where to get those. But a cheap pack of ramen noodles — I looked around at the grocery store and didn’t find any. I thought they were fairly ubiquitous no-money/no-time/no-cooking-skill items.

So I googled how to make ramen noodles – and it turns out real ramen noodles are alkaline noodles. I found a really good sounding recipe that uses rye flour, and then found a simpler one that I went with (since I didn’t have rye flour on hand). I rolled them out too thickly, but it’s a cool way to make something like an egg noodle without needing eggs.