Unfortunate Fortune Cookies

Prior to filleting my finger, I had decided to try to make fortune cookies for a friend's birthday get together. I haven't got anything particularly pithy to say about it, and I've stalled long enough trying to come up with something clever. So, while I am out of the kitchen, I might as well get you caught up on some of the cooking-goings-on about the joint.

Our core group of friends is scattered all over the city. That may not seem like such a big deal until you realize that Houston has a circumference of over 100 miles. Observe:

Not true to scale because the map does not quite go wide enough North/South to capture the distance between the Hovel and Roy-mantha's, or far enough East to get the true location of Kail's joint.

We chat through Facebook from time to time, and OF COURSE they are all loyal readers so you might be able to guess who some of them are. Anyway, Facebook may bridge a gap, but it does not fill the void that is left when you miss the people who were your best man, your future baby's godparents, your matron of honor, your ambulance driver, and the group that will show up for a last minute birthday dinner when everyone else blows you off. Hence, we have monthly game night at a different house each month. February was Team Robinson's turn due to being proud new home owners, and having a birthday to celebrate. So, we all piled into our vehicles and made the trek.

I had known that I wanted to make fortune cookies for Mrs. Robinson's birthday for awhile, but I hadn't got any practice in so I had no idea how they would turn out. I Googled what appeared to be a basic recipe: Mostly egg whites, flour, vanilla, water, and a bit of almond extract. "No big deal," I thought. "I've got this."

I started out by making up a few fortunes and printing them, and cutting them to size.

My favorite fortune ever: "Man who stands on toilet is high on pot."

The dough (that I have seen in several YouTube videos) is supposed to be very thin and runny. My dough was very thick and coarse. I decided to slowly add more water until I achieved my desired consistency.

When the batter was runny enough to my liking, I made coaster-sized discs on a well greased cookie sheet and baked until that magical "just done" time in a 400 degree oven. Working quickly, you have to get a cookie off the pan, place the fortune in the middle and fold it in half. You have to work fast, in theory, because the cookies harden into little crisps that won't bend if they cool. So snap to it!

Ouch, hot tamale! Wait, wrong ethnic group. Ouch, hot Wonton!

The next part sounds a bit weird, but you then have to bend the cookie over the rim of a coffee cup and put in a muffin tin to cool and harden. Bending it over the rim of the cup makes it into the exact right shape. 

Well, most of my fortune cookies never got truly hard. They tasted okay, but they were more like thin, almondy sugar pancakes. I had to make up for this failure by at least making them prettier to look at. If people were busy oooing and awing over them, they wouldn't notice that tell-tale texture was completely missing slightly less than ideal. Besides, Mrs. Robinson loves that sort of thing (meaning cutesy stuff).

Being now that I am a Goddess of the Double Boiler, I decided to chocolate dip them and sprinkle with, well, sprinkles. Do I need to remind y'all how to do that? Okay, last time for you newbs:

1.) Never melt chocolate in a microwave! Always use a double boiler. (i.e. pot of boiling water with a bowl of chocolate snugly placed over it. Stir frequently and do not walk off or this may happen.

 Next, all you have to do is dip your cookie tips into the melty goodness and sprinkle with rainbow sprinkles.

Dip and Sprinkle!

Everyone at the party ended up liking them despite their unfortunate texture. I thought y'all might enjoy a self-portrait with the completed product. Enjoy and happy Sweets Sunday.

Andrea c.2011, the Chocolate Sprinkle Period.

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.

Cakes Actually Worth Eating...

Now that wedding planning is in full swing, things are moving a long at a haphazard pace. Recently, Jon and I went to a cake tasting. In my mind, wedding cakes were more there for looks, not for the taste. Kind of a "last resort" if the guests hated everything about the meal, party, and overall felt resentful about the fact that they had to listen to someone's drunken cousin, Shelia, boohoo through a crappy "poem" that she had written for the occasion.

Please excuse my preconceived notions, but I thought wedding cakes were either some derivative of white or chocolate. Sometimes an odd flavor that no one really eats (like pistachio) sneaks into the mix because some bonehead couple ordered it because they wanted their wedding to be "unique". Bad move. Nothing like $1500 worth of cake sitting on the table because it is green, and tastes like sweet-nutty insulation.

Wedding cakes, in my mind, are overly sweet with a nasty after-taste. To me it is almost alcoholly, if that is even a word. If it is not the alcoholly taste, it's aspartame. The "better" of the cakes I have had throughout the many weddings I have been dragged to have lacked the after taste, but had the texture of sugared insulation. I had never met a wedding cake that I just thought was worth the hefty price of anything that has the word "wedding" in front of it. Any cake that did taste great did not look like a wedding cake.

Here drags in Jon's mother, who SWEARS she had the best wedding cake ever and that we should have one like his parents had. However, his parents really didn't have a wedding cake. They had 12 different flavored, regular cakes on cake stands connected with those atrocious bridges that you see in the all the weddings in the 1970's. The thing took up an 8 foot folding table. It was an eye sore with tulle and kinds of gaudy fluff. I am sure my future child's spouse will feel the same way about my wedding cake (because it will be an actual wedding cake, not 12 different flavored cakes with white icing posing a wedding cake). However, that is yet to be know. That being said, Jon's mom gets a big FAIL on the true wedding cake rating system.

So you might have noticed, despite my attempts to edit and correct, that there are some tense shifts in my writing in some places. Try as I might there will be at least one that sneaks in. This is because what you read above refers to how I previously felt. I now feel different. Here's why:

We went to a tasting at a place call Cakes By Gina. The only reason I had given her cakes a second glance is because I found a similar image of the one below with white and monarch butterflies that I fell in love with, and Gina had something similar that I thought could be adapted. You see, thinking that flavor was out, I was going for at least beautiful.

Martha Stewart's Over the Top Version

(Is there even a cake under there?)

Similar to Gina's verison

I was torn about the butterflies though. You see, we are getting married in December. Not many butterflies in the winter, and they really wouldn't really jive with that winter wonderland theme we were trying to work. Maybe snowflakes instead. But then I thought about it, and finally settled on birds. Jonathan and I are both outdoorsy. So instead of the cascade of butterflies, a flock of birds.

Again with the digressions, sheesh. So anyway, we get there and learn that Gina does torte-style cakes. I did not realize what that meant. Apparently, it means that there is a layer of cake, a layer of flavoring of some kind, followed by more cake, then icing. Sounded cool. So we order a few flavors and a few of the filling options. I take a bite...

The cake was the best cake I have EVER tasted. Light, moist, not overly sweet. Turns out Gina uses something like 30% less sugar than a traditional recipe calls for so that the actual flavor of the cake comes out. Fancy that. The first bite was traditional white with a vanilla butter cream. Decadent, delicious. Not to be outdone...except by the chocolate cake with the chocolate butter cream filling. I'm drooling just thinking about it. I think we tried 6 different cakes and 4 different fillings.

Then I got depressed. You see, we aren't having a groom's cake because Jon is having his relatives each bake some traditional culturally-relevant dessert, including, but not limited to the elusive kolache. Therefore, I thought we were going to be stuck with one flavor and have to duke it out. You see, Jon is an over-opinionated groom who actually has ideas about what he wants. This has already caused havoc in other departments, but again, I digress. Then I was informed of the following: Gina allows you to have each tier a different flavor at no additional charge. Wha What?! So, here's how it is going down.

Jonathan and Andrea Vacek's Wedding Cake

Shape: Round

Color: White with aqua swirling "damask-like" scroll pattern.

Number of tiers: 6
Theme: Flock of 2D birds similar to this flying in a flock up the side as if on the aqua wind.

Icing: Butter cream with gum paste birds

Flavors!: (Starting from the bottom tier up)

Tier 1: Traditional Bridal white with a vanilla butter cream filling

Tier 2: Chocolate with a chocolate butter cream filling

Tier 3 (Quintessential Jon and Andrea): Chocolate cake with a peanut butter, butter cream filling

Tier 4: Italian Cream Cake with a Cream Cheese filling

Tier 5: Traditional Bridal White with a Bavarian Cream filling.

I may have to stop back by Gina's place to have another tasting just to "make sure" I made the right choice. LOL. Here is a picture of how it eventually turned out.

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