Sweet, sweet victory!

In my last blog, I neglected to mention how the weekend of extravagance began! Biscuit decided to surprise me with an early Valentine's dinner to our favorite restaurant, La Campania in Waltham. We dined on roasted oysters, diver scallops over parsnip puree with cranberry-port reduction, veal saltimbocca, prosciutto di parma stuffed chicken, and two exquisite desserts - chocolate torta and pear crostata! Oh my goodness, was it delicious. The attention to detail, right down to the basil-infused olive oil and the warm, crisp bread, was exquisite.

And then, to my surprise, Biscuit presented me with a gift - a new digital camera! This, in fact, was the catalyst for the rash of baking I did on Sunday. You can see my new equipment above. Now that I had a new camera to document my creations, I had to get into the kitchen immediately. Before I could bake, Elaine was willing to pose for an early Sunday morning snapshot. She hasn't had her coffee yet.

This is where the last blog picks up the action - as I mentioned, the first baking activity was the upside-down cake. I then ventured into the realm of bars. I have always been successful with my magic bars, but these required little skill in the way of constructing the crust. The crust is simply graham crackers smooshed with butter and pressed into the pan. The crust for caramel crumb bars and citrus squares required something a little more intensive. I was able to use my use my trusty food processor to grind down some blanched almonds into a nice light texture. This combined with some butter and flour to make the base for my caramel crumb bars, as well as the crumb topping the would be used later. Here in began my problems.

First and foremost, my trusty pastry cutter broke on me. Now, I was raised on the notion that this job can be done simply by using two butter knives. This was always my least favorite task whenever I helped Mom in the kitchen. I liked wet ingredients much better, and of course the wet ingredients always tasted better (that is where the sugar resides!). As I grew older and my baking skills matured, I came to regard the dry ingredients as highly as the wet, and thus invested in a small pastry cutter, only to have it break on me after hundreds of crusts and crisps. You will be missed, pastry cutter. RIP - In Memoriam

My next trip up was a baking mistake I promised myself I would never commit. Thinking I could use the oven for more than one tray at a time, I popped both trays of bar crusts into the oven at the same time. The upper crust was for the citrus squares, the lower for the caramel bars. I could smell the burning before I could help the situation. The crusts both looked OK, but the damage had been done to the caramel crust.

The next issue I confronted was the caramel itself. Every other caramel I have ever made included butter or sweetened condensed milk. This was just sugar, water, corn syrup, and some salt. I was suspect, but I did it. The pot to the right is the beginning stages of boil. It had not become amber at all. It took a little longer than Martha indicated in her book for the caramel to achieve any color at all, but when it did come to, it seemed to be the right texture. The taste was less than impressive. Perhaps I am used to a more butterscotchy/dulce de leche type of caramel. This was not what I have come to think of as ribbony-smooth delight.

Alas, I finished the caramel bars by pouring the caramel over the burnt crust and added formed balls of crust to the top of the bars. They baked and came out ok. The problem was, the next day, the burning taste of the crust, when combined with the brittle, hardness of the caramel, did not make for a delicious treat. I ate several, but then they were summarily disposed of.

But this post is not meant to be a baking bummer! In fact, the very title of this post is VICTORY! And victory sure is sweet. The best thing to come of this day was the citrus bars. These bad boys, which require 8, count them E-I-G-H-T, eggs, were the fluffy stuff dreams are made of. I took about a thousand pictures of these, hoping to somehow capture how well they came out. Visually, I did my best, but to really capture the essence of these yummy bars, one would have to eat them! Here are a couple shots of the process and the final product (dusted generously with powdered sugar).

Straight out of the oven...





Scrumptious slices of heaven!









Valentine's Day citrus square for Biscuit ..









This concluded the Sunday night baking. I had to get up eventually for school the next day, so I had to clean up the kitchen and get ready for the week ahead. The highlight was knowing that I would be back in the kitchen to bake again on Monday night in preparation for a birthday cake. More on that in my next post!

Oh, Martha... or The Weekend of Extravagance!

I must admit - I just spilled my homemade chai tea latte because I was so excited to be back on blogger. Literally, my internet has been a portal to many a website this week; however, it has been restricting my access to me beloved blog. So sad! And the thing about it is I have so much to share!

Martha Stewart once wrote "Baking offers comfort and joy and something tangible to taste and savor." Man, was she ever right on the money. I was never a huge Martha fan, nor did I get emotionally involved when she was convicted for whatever it was she did. I really only began to marvel at her talents when I developed an extreme fondness for baking. Some people are tremendous at cooking gourmet food; others at concocting creative culinary delights. Furthermore, others are skilled at hosting and homemaking. Martha is tremendous at all of these. I was thrilled to receive her Baking Handbook for Christmas. This past Sunday, I grabbed a cup of tea and read it nearly cover to cover, once again awestruck at the recipes and the pictures that accompanied the descriptions. I have several goodies cookbooks, and most of them do not have pictures. How can you tempt the taste buds if at first you don't excite the eyes? It's a mystery to me, so I gravitated to this Martha masterpiece.

In celebration of Valentine's Day, I decided to make Biscuit a romantic pineapple-mango upside down cake. Martha expertly crafted her pineapple slices to be cored and include a circular center of luscious mango. When I went to core my pineapple slices, instead of using a standard round cookie cutter, I used a heart-shaped cutter. The next part was slightly trickier; trying to slice a ripe mango into pieces that allowed me to cookie cut the corresponding heart shape.

Interestingly enough, the cutting turned out to be the EASIEST part. I confronted my next challenge by creaming together butter and brown sugar. I am pretty good at putting the paddle attachment on the mixer and performing this baking necessity. The challenge on Sunday, however, was that I had to then spread that mixture evenly over the bottom of an 8x8 pan. This part literally took me 20 minutes. To evenly spread creamed butter and brown sugar seems like a simple task when equipped with a little offset spatula. It still took me forever to get this critical part right.

The rest of the process was quite fun! I placed the remaining pineapple and mango in a sieve to drain the juice. I whipped up a light and fluffy cake batter, then I layered the pan: creamed butter mixture on the bottom, aforementioned pineapple/mango cutouts, the remaining fruit, and the cake batter. I popped it in the oven for 50 minutes (no cake in Martha's book take less than fifty minutes to bake, so have a good chunk of time set aside for yourself. Here were the results: Below left - baking in the over. Below right - resting on the cooling rack.

Below center - finished product

Here is a shot of Biscuit enjoying the cake

and some of the slices.

I am quite proud of my first ever upside down cake. I continued to bake nearly all day Sunday. So much so that I had to buy Biscuit some new Wii games so that he would be entertained as I was occupied in the kitchen all day. I made citrus bars with a great deal of success and I tried a caramel crumb bar concoction that just didn't measure up. But just like with baking, certain things have to be done in batches. Such is the case with my blogging today. I will be back ... more than likely later today, to finish raving about my excursion into bar baking, then more on the Peppermint Devil's Food layer cake creation and the cheesecake thumbprints that I made in the last two nights. And, of course I will be telling you about my foray into candy creation when I made my mini marzipan mice. All this and more in the next edition! Stay tuned!

No bake = NO GOOD, and other weekend catastrophes

So, I have a wedding coming up. Currently, Biscuit and I are "Fighting the Fat," a local weight loss competition that, initially, I was bound and determined to win. Oh right, then I remembered that I LOVED to bake.

My Mom has this uncanny ability that Kerri and I do not seem to possess. She can cook and bake up a storm and not eat a bite of it. I mean, not even the cookie batter (which to me is often better than the actual cookie!). So silly Dayna decides to search the interweb to find some healthful baking. Good luck with that, Mongelli...

And so I landed on Allrecipes.com, a personal favorite site of mine. Biscuit and I shirked the traditional American pasttime of watching the Superbowl, and instead joined in Roger Federer's dismay as he lost to butt clown (Biscuit's own term...slightly censored) Rafael Nadal. Since we were both upset, I baked.

Or did I bake? I guess I technically didn't. Using the Allrecipes advanced search, I looked for cookies that contained cocoa and shortening, two ingredients which I had in abundance after the holidays. I found a recipe that sounded quite good - chocolate coconut macaroons, however, they were no-bake. Everything was to be done on the stove top. I would give you the recipe if I didn't bake these first.

I melted down the shortening with some cocoa, coconut, and sugar. I brought it to a boil and added the oats. Once I allowed the mixture to cool slightly, I began rolling into balls. No sooner did I dive into the batter did I realize how dry the cookie mounds looked as they awaited the fridge. I tried to reshape that balls into flat cookies, realizing that the mounds were not going to bake down at all (hence the no-bake thing), and these puppies just crumbled before my eyes.

I added some good old H2O to the mixture and was able to shape the remainder of the batter into cookies, which Biscuit proceeded to consume. I did not take this as a compliment - it was the first real sugar he was eating in weeks! After sugar substitutes being used in everything from his coffee and tea to his ice cream, I think the real stuff was like a drug, attracting him to eat these dry cocoa ball creations. I was none too pleased with these results.

A second, slightly more successful attempt were the caramel oatmeal pudding cookies I tried. Once again I splurged on real sugar and combined it with butter, some dried buttermilk mixture, oats, and butterscotch pudding, making these REALLY butterscotch oatmeal cookies, but I digress... The recipe called for 2.5 cups of oats. I kept adding, and adding, and ADDING oats. I literally must have used 5 cups until the darn things could solidify into cookies. I made about 4 normal shaped cookies, and noticed I was getting baker's fatigue (more like FRUSTRATION). I decided to spread the mixture into a greased 13x9 glass tray, and chilled them overnight. The result were 30 delicious oat bars that Biscuit and his colleagues consumed nearly instanteously.

(the terrible pudding cookies, part II)

Wanting to try for a healthified version of these bars, I attempted them again tonight with some sugar substitute instead of the real stuff. These things didn't solidify worth a darn. I guess the real stuff is totally worth using if you are going to bake. I suppose I will just have to learn my Mom's virtue of self-control, something I clearly do not possess around goodies.

In addition to this major mistake, I tried to make cocoa applesauce cookies, once again, for the sole reason because I had all the ingredients this recipe required. This does not make for a good recipe. The batter tasted like NOTHING - I think this was the result of using sugar substitute (as the recipe calls for) and shortening. I will never, ever use shortening for anything other than pie crust and chocolate chip cookies. So, in a vain attempt to solve the issue of "no taste" I added toffee bits. I had these deep in the recesses of my freezer. Knowing they were there and being on a diet did not bode well for me, so I figured I would use them. These bits did nothing to enhance the taste nor the appearance of the cookie, save to give the cookie a bonbon look to the outside. Too bad it didn't taste as nicely.

Only after I took pictures with my very bleary camera (sad news; the elph camera which has brought you so many snaps of baked goods is slowly but surely dying) did I realize both the nasty macaroons and their cousin the applesauce cocoa cookie look very similar. Alas, here they are:
The No-Bake Disaster

The psuedo bonbons

I have learned a lesson: I will stick with baking (no more no-baking) and I will stick with sugar! Lesson LEARNED!

Christmas Tidings

Happy New Year to the baking blogosphere.


As I mentioned in my Happy Holidays blog, there was a whole lot of baking going on. After dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 Ice Storm, the only thing left to do was celebrate the season with family and friends. The first few batches were delicious butter cookies, frosted in festive fashion. Then, Christmas week, we got down to business.

Biscuit and I met up with Kerri and her Favorite at the family compound for a night of gingerbread baking. There were all sorts of cookie designs made (for anything further on that topic, I recommend you drop Kerri a message for elaboration), but Biscuit and I specialized in the more traditional fare.

Biscuit preparing his dough

On the way to the oven

All plumped up after baking

Here are the final products, all decorated and ready for consumption:

You may notice, next to the piglet, the bespectacled and button snowmen, and the two handsome Santas, are a different variety of cookies. These are my famed rugelach, requested by my mom to be baked for any holiday or family function. These are from a recipe I found after watching a Food Network Christmas cookie program. They can be found at the Barefoot Contessa website at http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/rugelach-recipe/index.html . The dough is a delicious cream cheese-based dough that is really easy to make. The tricky part comes in the preparation. The dough gets divided into quarters, then chilled, then rolled out, filled with jam, walnuts, and sugary cinnamon goodness, then CHILLED, then eggwashed, then CHILLED again, and then finally baked. The result, however, is worth all the time and effort.

I regret that I do not have any close-up shots of the rugelach, as they are delicious and quite elegant to look at. However, I have a nice shot of my very tasty sugarplums. While people have heard and even sung the praises of sugarplums, I have found that few people ever ate them. There was no way this curious baketress could ignore this mystery. I did some research and I found a recipe that appealed to me. These cookies are often made with stone fruits, but I found a recipe on Cooks.com that used maraschino cherries instead of figs or dates. The dough consists of the basics - flour, sugar, etc - but then is combined with ground walnuts and oats. This dough is shaped around the maraschino cherry, baked, cooled, and then dredged in a mixture of sugar and cinnamon.

Here is the final product:

I gave the sugarplums as a gift to family and friends along with these snacks. I have always loved Florentine Lace Cookies and have only ever seen them dipped in chocolate in Italian bakeries. These variety, a recipe from Rachael Ray's Everyday magazine, are called jeweled lace cookies. They are embellished with cranberries and pistachios. The cookie, when made according to recipe, have a mere 35 calories per cookie.

They are crisp, nutty, and delicious. I may try to make them again with different versions of fruit and nuts, or may omit the nuts all together and just dip them in chocolate. The cookies are made in a pot on the stovetop. While the recipe indicates you can take the batter directly out of the pot, I recommend you allow it to cool. This is not simply because it is hard to handle the hot batter... it's more a matter of the batter being incredibly sticky and caramel-y while it is still warm.

My final two creations of 2008 were pies: one sweet and one savory. To the right you will see another Rachael Ray recipe - her delicious German Chocolate Pecan Pie. While it is tricky to see the details, this is your traditional pecan pie - corn syrup and all - but it includes a twist. Once the pie crust is made, you pour in half a bag (or more, if you wish) of chocolate chips. They begin melting in the pie pan almost immediately. Next, you pour in your pecan mixture with the beautiful addition of sweet, falky coconut. The result is perfection! This is best served warm with some vanilla ice cream.

The last pie was of the pizza variety. While Biscuit and I had plans to battle the New Year's Eve snow and head out to Shrewsbury for sushi, we submitted to staying in for an evening of Guitar Hero on the Wii with a barbeque chicken pizza. We used no recipe - just our own taste buds. We mixed premade pizza sauce with barbeque sauce; grilled some chicken on our trusty Foreman grill, and used purple onions and some fresh, sweet basil, along with a mixture of shredded Cheddar and buffalo mozzerella. This was the completed pizza, only seconds before we dug in.

Biscuit and I are trying to behave between now and the wedding so we can look svelt for the big day and for our honeymoon to the Dominican Republic. I am sure there will still be some healthy baking and dessert making going on, as I can nary resist the sweet stuff.

Until next time, happy eatings!

Happy HOL-i-days!

I confess - I have been a very bad blogger as of late. Somehow, you start with a blog, then you taper off. I had a million and one pictures I wanted to upload and show you all over the last few months, but I have lapsed in keeping on top of this.

Several little things have been a hindrance, preventing me from blogging. Yes, excuses, excuses...I know. But Biscuit and I have been in the process of applying to graduate school. We have been doing a great deal of wedding planning, and of course, we have been getting ready for the holidays. Here is an update from the last few months.

October:
To start off this fantastic month, we celebrated Mommy Foosela's birthday. One of my gifts was a cake I saw Paula Deen make. It had a lot of butter in it, so it must be delicious, right? Well, butter, yes... delicious? Well, that was debatable. Here are some pictures from that disaster.
The cake was quite easy to bake - all three layers of it. The drippy caramel goo was also quite tasty and stayed (pretty much) in place between the layers.



The frosting is where things got tricky. If you happen to think that the frosting has a consistency a bit like concrete, well, you are correct. It was very difficult to spread. It was more a matter of spackaling it to the cake. But it worked ... and it sure looked better after it was decorated.



We all ate it - demolished it, actually. One of the best parts of the entire cake was the caramel center that developed. So tasty!



The other "thing" that came from this recipe was my creation of maple walnut fudge. Yeah, by any stretch, it is not really fudge. In fact, it is just the recipe for this frosting, but when you add some walnuts to it and pour it into a well-greased 9x9 glass dish and chill it, it becomes a most wonderful rich and luscious fudge. So good!

November:
November brought us Thanksgiving, a true food festivus. Both my family and Biscuit's Mom made fabulous meals that satisfied many people. My addition to the special day were baked goods, of course. I made scrumptious pumpkin whoopie pies with cream cheese frosting, maple snickerdoodles, and a German Chocolate Pecan Pie. So tasty. Pictures of these creations will follow soon.

December:
This is the month of decadence. The first weekend of December is the kickoff to the holiday season. My family throws their annual Christmas tree party. Amazing food is in abundance. This year was even more special because we topped off the evening with a trip to Worcester to see Neil Diamond in concert. We had Grammy and Biscuit's parents in tow. It made for a great night.

December also saw one of the worst ice storms to hit our area ever. Biscuit and I have been out of school for over a week now and have had time to master our ping pong skills and create delicious Christmas treats. We have made lace cookies, chocolate chip cookies, caramel shortbread, and even SUGAR PLUMS! Have you ever sampled the bliss of a sugar plum? Well, these things are magic... the stuff that dreams are made of!

I will update again soon with all the pictures from the gingerbread festivus that will occur tomorrow. Until then, seasons greetings and EATINGS!