Cake Wreck Round Two

I made a cake for the get together of the MFE gang last weekend. It was the first time we were hosting at our place, so I wanted everything to be perfect. I painstakingly stacked and iced a devil's food, double layer cake, but neglected to saw the layers flat because it had never really made a difference in the past. Also, the last time I attempted leveling a cake, I got cut. It's all just aesthetics anyway, right? So, I let it be.

The presentations were coming together nicely. My individual sized quiches were out of the oven and plated. All that was left was to hop in the shower and rinse the chocolate out of my hair and the onion juice off my skin. As Jon and I left the kitchen, I did a quick double take at the cake.

Me: "Does it look like the top layer is sliding off to you, babe?"
Jon: "Maybe, but it is probably just cooked a little lopsided. That's all."
Me: "Hmmm."

*We dash off to shower for the party*

This is what we found when we returned:







Not only had the top layer half slid off the bottom layer, it had come to rest against our white walls. Jon's advice: "Just leave it, we don't have time to do anything about it."

I very delicately slid the top layer back to center, but it almost immediately started sliding off again. It was turning into a true Sisyphus moment. I then have a stroke of genius.

Me to Brain: "How to wedding cake decorators get all those layers to stay put?"

Brain: "Umm...they actually take the time to level the layers."

Me: "Shut up brain, who asked you anyway?"

Brain: "Ummm, you just did genius"

Me: "Don't smart mouth me like that! What you were supposed to say was wooden stakes.

Brain: "Right..."

ME: "JON! Bring me some toothpicks, STAT!"

Jon proceeds to dash over with a box of toothpicks and we stab the top layer of the cake into submission. It actually worked. Then I had to wash the wall to get the brown icing off. We had just finished cleaning the wall and cake stand when we heard the first knock at the door. Everyone enjoyed the cake, oblivious to our shame.

April's Fool: That Would Be Me

Setting: I'm driving down the road on a Monday evening, trying desperately not to fly off the most pot-hole ridden street in Houston. I'm listening to NPR and decided that I am going to blow my head off if I heard just ONE more story about civil unrest or natural disasters. (I get it, it's a bad situation over there. Can we just have one other story type or must my entire 2 hours of commute each day be this: tsunami, earthquake, Libya, nuclear meltdown, Egypt, Gaddafi, nuclear power, Libya, Libya, Ivory Coast, Rick Perry dicking over education and making a lot of racist comments, Libya, Libya.)

*Suddenly my phone rings*
(So weird, my phone just rang as I finished typing that)

It's my lovely husband. He has come into a possible barter situation with some high end baking tins for muffins. He said that our buddy Patterson was in possession of said tins and was willing to barter for Rock-o-liscious Peanut Butter Cups.




A far better picture of Patterson than my earlier portrait.


Jon asked me what a fair barter was for the tins. He started at 6 dozen PB cups.

That doesn't sound like a lot until you realize that would be the equivalent of 36 packages of the store bought Reese's. That's a package a week for most of a year.

I get a little dizzy. That is a lot of work. I waver. Do I really want these tins THAT bad? In a shaky voice, I tell Jon that I feel that number might be a little high. Would Patterson settle for a smaller number? We proceed to seriously barter for the next 5 minutes until we agree on 4 dozen. I still feel a little shafted, but I detour to the poor-people grocery store for chocolate.

At the store, I found a few bricks of bulk melting chocolate for a reasonable price for the very first time. I carefully read the package to see if it was the dreaded milk chocolate that would cause problems noted in previous posts. Although it had some different ingredients than the baker's chocolate, I got it anyway to save time and money. A one pound brick of  bulk chocolate was the same price as a half pound brick of the Baker's chocolate.

Yes, I like my chocolate with Jack...

I drag ass out of the store, get home, cook dinner, then set to work cranking out candy. I started melting the bulk chocolate, which, by the way, melted horribly like the milk chocolate did for some reason. After about a dozen are complete, Jon stepped in to start helping. He sweetly started me a second pb ball, and started chopping the second brick to melt. After awhile, he steps out to go watch the NCAA Championship Game. I put two completed muffin tins of candy in the fridge to harden.

Jon stepped back in a few minutes later to help me finish of the 3rd and 4th dozen. I sigh with exhaustion. Then, Jon asked if I could make him a special one (read extra fat with 2 layers of peanut butter and chocolate.) I told him I would, except there was a slight problem: we were coming up a little short on chocolate for the 4th dozen. We were about 5 cups shy. He told me that was OK and not to worry about making the full dozen, that we would just stop when we ran out of chocolate.

I got upset because that meant I would have to, at some point, pay Patterson the additional 5 or so cups I owed him. This meant another trip to the store, and another evening making a mess of the kitchen. Jon seems oblivious to why I am upset despite my whining clearly thought out communication. Then he  begins to realize why I'm so upset when I say, "I am almost to the 4 dozen, I just want to finish them out with whatever chocolate we have in the cabinet."

Jon: *blank stare* Four dozen?
Me: Yea, you said Patterson wanted 4 dozen for the tins.
Jon: Yea, but you only have half a dozen here and 1 dozen in the fridge. You're not even close to 4 dozen.
Me: Umm... open the fridge

The only food in our fridge

Jon: Oh my...
Me: What?
Jon: I was only joking about the 4 dozen. You couldn't tell?
Me: EXCUSE ME?
Jon: I was only joking about that number, you just had to make a few for Patterson. I didn't honestly mean for you to make a whole 4 dozen.
Me: *facepalm*

*On a side note, I am now the proud owner of 2 restaurant quality muffin tins. Jon took some of the cups to Patterson at work today. Here is Patterson's response: "These are better than Reese’s!  They’re hearty like they’re full of sustenance.  You should sell give me some of them around Christmas."

Keep dreaming Patterson, you should have enough to last you until about Christmas if you only eat 2 a week, for the rest of the year.

My new pans

Sweet Anniversaries and Other Great Achievements

I know Jonathan and I just got married in December, but it was so close to our 5 year anniversary that I HAD to do something. He is also having a crummy time at the office, so I thought I might do something to brighten up his day.

Guys get embarrassed about flowers so I didn't want to send those. I decided that perhaps a cookie or candy bouquet would be better because a fruit bouquet would have probably gone straight in the trash. He scorns all things healthy. After Googling around, I found some neat ideas. Since he is a Reese's Peanut Butter fiend, I thought this number would be nice:


Awww!


That was until I realized that it cost 60 freakin' dollars! Sixty dollars + delivery charge for 12 standard sized Reese's PB cups plus another dozen or so "fun size" (read: mini) ones, a bow, and tissue paper. Screw THAT! I decided I could probably make it on my own and save myself some money. Not that he isn't worth the $60+, but if I ever want to move out of our ghetto hovel, we have to make some cuts somewhere. So I made a scaled down version because he didn't need THAT much candy, and I had to sneak around the house in spells to get it done. It would have looked suspicious if I carried in a giant grocery bag of candy. I swear he is like a puppy following me around at times. So here is a look at how it turned out, and I will give you a general brief on how it is made:



Not quite as flashy, but does the job. Probably should've added a bow. Oh well.

 To do this project, you will need:

• 1 cheap flower pot, coffee cup or tin bucket
• Floral foam that will snuggly fit into the bottom of your cheap pot
• Wooden craft sticks, dowel rods, or Popsicle sticks in the number appropriate to the number of candy stems you want.
• A hot glue gun with hot glue. Hopefully, your gun has a "low" setting.
• 1 bag of crinkled paper. (If you are cheap like me, you found some old construction paper you had lying around from a previous project, accordion folded it a bit, and sent it through the paper shredder. Ta-freakin-da! Shredded crinkly paper at half the price.
• A big bow (if you're into that sort of thing)
• Your loved one's favorite candy bar in a variety of sizes, in the amount according to the number of stems you want.

Heat your glue gun on a low setting and grab all your supplies. You can glue your foam into your container if you like. I didn't so I could reuse the flowerpot. The end result wiggled a bit because of this, but it was no big deal. If you want to glue it in, put a ring of hot glue around your floral foam and press firmly into the bottom of the container.

Now it is time to start making your "flowers". Turn your candy face down so that you will be displaying the candy name in the final product and not gluing over it. Spread enough glue along a wooden stick that will run down the entire length of the candy bar. Give it just a second to cool so that it does not melt the plastic wrapper of the candy. Then, firmly press the wooden stick into the back of the candy packaging. Repeat for all your stems.

Once all your stems have had time to harden, jab them into the floral foam at various heights and rows. Start with the back and tallest row first, working your way shorter and more forward. Feel free to break of the bottom of your sticks to achieve different heights. An ugly bottom won't matter because it is hidden in the foam.

Slap a bow on the pot for good measure. We had no bows, guys don't dig bows. ALL RIGHT! I forgot the damn bow. Stop judging me. Add the crinkly paper around the base of the sticks to hide the floral foam, and there you go.

I'm sure mine would have looked better if I had more time. (I.e. not done while hopping on one leg while trying to pull pants on for work and running late as usual). The happy effect was achieved despite missing the bow. My beau was happy to get some sweets on a day that was so completely shitty, except for the fact that 5 years ago on that day we became a couple. He was even sweet enough to bring one candy home for us to share.

A Sad Day in Cupcake Land

Jon and I didn't do Valentine's Day this year. It's a corporate holiday dreamed up to increase chocolate sales around the Great Depression, and we figured, meh, we just got married. That's love enough...for now.

However, I stumbled across a Food Network Magazine at the office with a recipe that I just HAD to try. I nicked the page from the magazine and dashed home with euphoric, klepto-like glee.

The recipe is for homemade chocolate mini cupcakes, frosted with peanut butter icing, dipped in a chocolate ganache. My heart was all a flutter. When I saw this recipe, I felt like this:

Everything in the world is MAGICAL!

I should have known this was going to be a fail from the very beginning, but I was blinded by cupcake glee. Every time I encountered a warning sign that should have signified that this recipe was doomed to fail, I am going to write it in red. For example, I seriously had to go to the store on three different to get all the ingredients. Two of those three trips were to Wal-mart. Even checking out at the register at Wal-mart with these ingredients was a hassle. They just wouldn't scan, and the cashier, for some odd reason, could not properly type in the UPC code. Seriously.

The Sunday before Valentine's Day was going to be the last time that I will be cooking for awhile because Jon and I are going heading to the in-laws every weekend to help with the family business. Yea. Now was the time to cook, and there was no going back. I plowed mixed forward.

With my mise en place rockin', I started making the cupcakes. I must have gone over the directions 500 times with OCD-like precision to make sure every single step was right. I chopped about 900 different types of chocolate:



Chop Chop Chop!

Then I had to scald some heavy cream. After the cream is scalded, you are supposed to pour it over some peanut butter chips, let it sit for a few minutes, and then mix into a smooth paste for frosting. Scalding cream is really no big thing, that is unless your oven coils will not nest flat into the stove. After my pot sat on high for quite awhile without a boil, I began to wonder what was going on. After closer examination, my stove's knobs looked a little funny. Here's what I think happened: The stove's original knob got broken off by a previous tenant, so the landlord went to the hardware store and bought the first stove knob he could find. What he failed to notice during installation is that this knob is the opposite of all the other stove knobs. (i.e. this one has the HI setting on the opposite side of the dial than the other three burner knobs. So that means when this burner says HI when the temperature is actually on LO and vice versa. My hovel gets ghetto-er by the minute.

While the peanut butter set, I went to filling cupcakes sleeves. The batter was dark, rich, and absolutely fabulous. However, it was so thick, it was difficult to get it off the spoon into the muffin cups. I made a huge mess, but that was no surprise really. The real surprise came when I filled up 36 muffin cups, realizing that the recipe was only supposed to make 24 cupcakes. I put the first 24 in the oven and set the timer.

Afterward, I went to work smoothing the PB chips. I only had a shallow bowl left to mix in. I pulled out the hand mixer and started it on the slowest setting. Peanut Butter Creme Fresh soon splattered all over my kitchen because the bowl was too shallow to use a hand mixer.



You can see splatter on my hand and on the counter there.

This recipe, I swear, took every bowl, whisk, measuring spoon/cup, and spatula I owned. I had to stop 3 times mid-recipe to wash a dish that I needed. I sighed and carried on. I sadly misread that the PB mixture is to go in the freezer to harden after mixing. It was supposed to go in the fridge.  

 

About this time, the timer is going off for the cupcakes. I take out the first batches and put in the second. Something seemed terribly wrong. Jon and I tried a cupcake to see what was up. Guess what we found:

This means that my oven temperature gauge is off as well. I had made 24 mini hockey pucks. Twenty-four f-ing Puck-cakes from scratch. I decide to carfully monitor the remaining 12 to see if they could be salvaged. 

While they were cooking, I had to make a ganache and finish up the PB frosting. The recipe said that I was to mircowave the chocolate pieces with buttermilk for 2 minutes. By now, you should know how I feel about chocolate in the microwave. I started at 30 seconds and pulled my now rock hard PB frosting from the freezer. I pulled the chocolate out of the microwave and was able to ganache it right away. The PB frosting, on the other hand, required an ice-pick to get it out of the bowl. I was supposed to whip it into a fluffy paste, but it only came out as a thick turd log. I piped that shit on the salvaged second batch of cupcakes.

Look kids! Poo cupcakes!

Then came the dipping of the turd-frosted cupcakes into the ganache. Sigh. The frosting didn't really adhere too well to the puck-cakes.  It fell into the ganache bowl and had to be fished out and squished back on. Here is what resulted:

Hockey Puck-cakes with Turd-Burglar Icing Dipped in Diarrhea.  Yummy.

I walked out of the kitchen in disgust, both of my sinks full. My counters were covered in chocolate. Why you ask?

Dripped all over the kitchen.

Since this incident, we have been living on pizza, sandwiches, take-out, and dinner parties at other people's houses. Fuck cooking. I quit.

Why Does a Good Recipe Never Work Twice?

 Jon has been in such a rage about the Rock-tastic Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups that he has spreading the word about them around the office like a bad case of the flu. We got invited to a party on Sunday from one of his co-workers, Patterson, and Jon practically held the man at gunpoint to get him to say that we needed to bring some of the candies to the party.

...as Patterson would say. (but not in Comic Sans, he has more discerning taste than that.)

I love my husband. I really do. However, candy making is one of those things that you have to stick with constantly. It's not like a cake you can pop in the oven and walk away from for like 30 minutes while it bakes. If you do happen to walk away from candy for even a split second, this happens:

Or this:

OH GOD!

or EVEN THIS

So let me just say this was not how I planned to spend my Saturday evening. I was hoping to have at least 100 more comments to moderate concerning the "What Recipe to Cook Giveaway" post. (Okay, maybe just like one. A blogger can dream can't they?) Or to clean up the ghetto hovel I live in like a @#$&$ adult. I mean, like most of my generation, I am like this most of the time. (that's by Allie, a waaaay better blogger than me.) I have to start doing better. Y'all know my dirty secrets...

At 8:30, I get started while Jon is supposed to be doing his share to clean up this dump. However, he totally disregards my demands to throw shit away and decides he wants to help. Apparently, he forgot what happened last week. Despite all this, we manage to get a little rhythm going. Then, I start to notice that something is really not working quite right.

FYI: I'm following the same recipe I gave you folks earlier for PB cups, but using the chocolate chip method instead of the Baker's Chocolate Method. This is because I didn't want to make one more trip to the poor-people grocery store today. 

I noticed that the chocolate chips are not melting down as well as the Baker's Chocolate. The chips do melt, but they form this nasty, thick film that looks like a toddler smeared his feces all over my double boiler.

"I'm here to F-up your recipe BIG time!"

The chocolate chip goo stuck to the spoon, the muffin cups, and made molten napalm burns on my hands no less than 50 times. It also didn't go near as far as the box of Baker's Chocolate. About half way through the candy making process, I start to notice we are painfully short of chocolate.

Me: Babe, we are almost out chocolate.

Jon: Here let me help scrape the bowl to get that last bit. *sizzling sound* Shit! That burns!

Me: Yea. So...I think there is going to have to be an emergency, mid-recipe chocolate run.

Jon: *fists on hips in superhero fashion* Allow me! *dashes out the door, down the stairs, and across town to Wal-mart.*

God bless that man for braving Wal-mart on a Saturday night in Texas.....moving on.

Jon: *bursting back through the door* Here!

Me: Perfect timing! We need a new bowl on the boiler STAT!

...and with the precision of a surgical/acrobatic team we trade bowls, unwrap Baker's Chocolate, and stir the mix with nary a missed beat.

I start to notice the Baker's chocolate forms this smooth, creamy texture that oh so easy pours off the spoon into the muffin cups. It is like magic again. It almost goes double the distance the bag of chips went, and because there is no scraping or stirring, the candies get cranked out quick. We now have like 50 of them hardening in the fridge. Unfortunately, I ate one and now I am still up blogging to you at 4 a.m. 

So here is the take away message: If you are going to make my Rock-o-licious Chocolate Peanut Butter cups, use Baker's Chocolate and you can spoon it in in no time. If you INSIST on using chocolate chips, my advice is to pipe that shit into the molds with a Ziploc bag.  

Oh, and beat your husband while he sleeps, using a sock filled with oranges because he volunteered you to bring 9 million PB cups to a party.

If you like what you see, please Follow Me for more recipes and cooking related antics.

Magical Candy Making

This weekend, I had to rearrange the kitchen to be more user friendly. During the engagement period, I just shoved kitchen-like items into various cabinets and hoped for the best. After having a wine bottle come crashing down on my head and a stew pan fall and bruise my leg, I needed something else to do while not to getting hurt in the kitchen. I decided candy making would be the next challenge to undertake. Molten sugar burns sounded fun compared to being skewered and concussed.

If you haven't figured it out by now, Jon and I are huge fans of the peanut butter and chocolate combination. It's in everything from our Thanksgiving pies to our wedding cake. However, before I undertook this endeavour, I flashed-back on the batches upon batches of chocolate I've burned over the...um... months. In no mood to relive THAT nightmare, I decided on using the old-fashioned, double boiler method. Microwaves and chocolate just don't jive people. They just don't jive. *very serious face, arms crossed*

Here's what you need to make *trumpets blaring*

Rock-o-licious Peanut Butter Cups
(I added the rock-o-licious part, you can just call them PB cups if you like)

1 (11.5 ounce) package milk chocolate chips*
1 cup peanut butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup confectioner's sugar
1 package of mini-muffin cup liners or trim regular muffin cup liners to half of their height. (I tried both methods, and the big ones were just too much candy in one sitting. Yes, even for me.)

*Let me just say that I used chips in one batch and 1-2 boxes of Semi-Sweet Baker's Chocolate in another. I preferred the Box-o-Baker's Chocolate myself. You can use the flavor you like most. Oh, I also didn't divide. I melted all at once.


Distructions Directions:

Microwave 1/2 chocolate chips in a microwave safe container for 2 minutes, stirring each minute. Don't EVER do this! Use a double-boiler, which is just fancy for a pot of boiling water with a metal bowl fitting snug over it. Trust me on this one; don't relive my shame. You have to use a bowl that the will not sit in the water. If the water splashes over the chocolate, it is ruined. See below picture for an idea. Be sure to stir regularly so the chocolate doesn't burn. Believe me, as soon as you turn your back...it will. *dramatic music*

While the water starts to boil and the chocolate starts to melt, make the peanut butter ball like so:

In a small bowl, mix together peanut butter, confectioners' sugar and salt. The peanut butter loses its tackiness when you add the confectioner's sugar. I then made a PB ball, wrapped it in plastic wrapped, and put in the fridge to chill. To me, it made the PB even easier to work with. You don't have to do it, don't get your panties in a wad if you don't have time to chill it.



"Mise en place!" as Chef Anne would say.


Spoon melted chocolate into muffin cups, filling halfway. If you have hands of steel, you can make a piping bag out of a sturdy plastic bag and clip the corner. I tried both ways, each with their own advantages. You have to work quicker when piping because the chocolate cools faster. However, it is less messy. The spooned chocolate stays hotter, but gets everywhere on the way to the muffin cup. Messy Messy Messy! You decide what works for you. Here is me attempting not to scald myself:

Piping bag inside the oven mitt.

With a spoon, you can draw the chocolate up the sides of the cups until evenly coated (if you like). What I did is make a fat, quarter-to-half-dollar sized disc of PB from the ball and gently pressed it into the hot chocolate at the bottom of the muffin cup. If you look closely at the first picture, you can see that it sort of welled up around the PB disk. Don't press too hard or you will have PB at the bottom of your cup instead of the inside.

If you divided your chocolate, melt the remaining chocolate. Spoon/pipe over the peanut butter center and spread the chocolate to edges of cups. Then place the candies in the fridge to cool and harden. Here is how my came out:



Excuse me little niblit, you PB is showing. Oh my! 

These beauties were summarily nommed until gone. There were no survivors for the office.

Christmas Parties and Other Cooking Fiascos

I have been to no less than 6 million Christmas parties in the past week. This brough a montage of culinary defeats. Although, I must say, parties are like the office when it comes to the dumping grounds of my latest defeat. In some ways this is good: you can peddle off almost anything on a drunk. There is also some bad: i.e. the drunk tells you how awful it is.

Thankfully, I did not experience this with the latest recipe to give me an "aspic" whoopin':
Marbled Chocolate Cookie Bark.

The recipe sounds impossibly easy: melt white chocolate, melt dark chocolate, break up 10 oreos, mix 1/2 in each flavor. Mix 2T of peanut butter in the white chocolate for some odd reason. Then pour on a cookie sheet and swirl with a knife. Easy enough right? Wrong.

White chocolate is my nemesis. Well, one of them aside from the kolache. I can never get that stuff to melt without burning and forming a crust.

The recipe says, "microwave in 30 second intervals, stir". Ummm... 30 seconds in my microwave = crusty caramelized white chocolate brick.

Maybe the oven would be better. It all started out alright, but I looked away for a nano second too long and BAM! Crusty. WTF!

I accidently microwaved the oreos with the chocolate. I burned the hell out of the oreos and stank up the entire kitchen. So, I said, "the hell with it" as I normally do and mixed everything together. What came out was a reasonably ok snack. Neato side effect was that the final product had a mocha-ish flavor. Most of the bark got eaten, but it took some peddling.

BREAKING NEWS:
Just got a text: "Did you take the candy home?"
I must have a fan!