zonkered.net

For somebody who bakes as much as I do – I made orange sour cream cupcakes last weekend, and should really post that – the fact that I don’t, or didn’t have a Reliable Brownie Recipe is downright weird. So I spent the last couple of days looking for one, and now I have a Reliable Brownie Recipe.

Score.

This is a slightly modified version of the King Arthur Flour fudge brownie recipe, and its rich, moist, chocolatey, and not too sweet. I didn’t add the chocolate chips they called for (used pecans instead) and I’m glad, because I think that would have been too much chocolate for me.  This makes a square pan, which is more than enough for me; the original makes a 9×13 pan’s worth.

1/2 C (1 stick) butter

1 1/4 C sugar

2 large eggs

3/4 C dutch process cocoa

1/2 t salt

1/2 t baking powder

1/2 T vanilla extract

3/4 C AP flour

1 C chopped pecans

In a medium-sized microwave-safe bowl, or in a saucepan set over low heat, melt the butter, then add the sugar and stir to combine. Return the mixture to the heat (or microwave) briefly, just until it’s hot (about 110°F to 120°F), but not bubbling; it’ll become shiny looking as you stir it.

Crack eggs into a medium-sized bowl and beat with cocoa, salt, baking powder and vanilla until well combined. Remove sugar mixture for heat and add to cocoa mixture, beating again until the batter is smooth.

Add flour and nuts and combine, then spread into a square pan and bake for 30 minutes at 350°F, or until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean.

Highly recommended with vanilla ice cream or a tall glass of milk.

Today was a day of sitcomesque kitchen disasters. Let’s recap, shall we?

We began with the goal to bake Smitten Kitchen’s Pound Cake. As you can see, this is a cake with a hell of a lot of steps I’m normally not willing to make. From the outset, I’d already made adjustments – cake flour sifted once instead of AP flour sifted three freaking times, amaretto liqueur instead of cognac – but I fully intended to do everything else by the book.

Ahahaha. Yeah.

The first crisis came when I preheated the oven and discovered that oh, hey, it was smoking. So it went off, I put my sifted dry ingredients aside, took the racks out and scrubbed the bottom. Put the racks back in, went back to the recipe.

Break 8 eggs trying to separate four of them before finally decided to fuck this shit and just put the eggs in whole rather than beating the whites and adding them to the batter at the end.

Despite all this crap, the cake actually turned out really well – moist with a delicate crumb and a rich lemon-amaretto flavor. Definitely a keeper.

Fuck This Shit Cake (Or, Lemon-Amaretto Pound Cake, if you insist)

2 C cake flour, sifted
1/2 t baking powder
Sea salt
1/2 lb butter, softened (2 sticks)
3/4 C + 2 T sugar
4 eggs
1 T amaretto liqueur
zest of 1 lemon

1. Preheat oven to 350F.
2. Sift together flour, baking powder and a generous pinch of salt. Set aside.
3. Cream butter, then add sugar and beat until blended. Add eggs and beat until smooth.
4. Add amaretto and lemon zest.
5. Beat in dry ingredients in batches. I did two batches, because I’m essentially lazy that way.
6. Pour into a greased loaf pan and bake. The length of time will depend on your pan – the original recipe called for 35-45 minutes, but it took closer to 50-60 minutes in my silicone pan.

Later today I plan to make a raspberry-balsamic sauce to pour over the cake. I’m going to assume I’ll meet with less disaster this time.

I am a giant nerd, y’all.

A friend and I have spent all day today RPing Watchmen (Nite Owl/Ozymandias, to be specific.  This is my OTP.  Don’t look at me like that.) and the secondary character in this RP ended up being the food.  Specifically, homemade manicotti made in Dan’s kitchen.

Then we finished, and I wrote the recipe.

Dan Dreiberg’s Manicotti:

Sauce:

1-28 oz can crushed tomatoes
1-28 oz can diced tomatoes, drained
2 T tomato paste
1 C red wine
2 roasted garlic cloves, minced fine
1 C onion, minced fine
1 t oregano
1 t tarragon
1 t rosemary
1 t red pepper flakes
3 T extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste
1/4 C grated romano pecorino

Manicotti Filling:

1 lb ricotta cheese
2 C fresh shredded mozzarella
2 T fresh chopped parsley
1 egg

Plus:

Extra mozzarella, parmagiano reggiano, and romano pecorino to top
1 package manicotti shells, cooked al dente.

Preheat oven to 350F.  Saute onion in olive oil in a heavy bottomed pot.  When translucent, add roasted garlic and cook for about five minutes.  Deglaze pan with wine, and add tomatoes, paste, herbs, and salt and pepper.

Meanwhile combine ricotta, mozzarella, and parsley and egg in a bowl.  Stuff carefully into manicotti tubes.

Drizzle a thin layer of sauce in the bottom of a lightly oiled lasagna pan.  Layer in manicotti tubes, and top with the remaining sauce.  Sprinkle a mixture of mozzarella, parmagiano reggiano and romano pecorino on top and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until bubbly.

Nite Owl says eat the damn manicotti.

True story: despite the fact that I work in New York (and live 20 minutes via mass transit from Manhattan), I have not had a cupcake since I moved east.  Or for many years before.  This is only notable because New York is home to the cupcake trend that will never die, with many many bakeries devoted to them.

Many.

But anyway, this week I decided I wanted coconut cupcakes and spent half the week at work hunting down a recipe (Ina Garten’s was an automatic no – nearly 2 pounds of butter? FIVE eggs?) and finally settled on this one, which seriously is everything you could ever want in a coconut cake.  For the frosting though, I started with my mother’s cream cheese frosting and diverted pretty quickly when it called for 4 cups of powdered sugar.  Sorry, Mom.

1-8 oz brick light cream cheese

2 T butter

2 C powdered sugar

1 t vanilla

1 t almond extract

2 T milk

1/ C coconut flakes

Blend with a mixer.  Spread on cooled cupcakes and sprinkle with extra coconut, and commence with ruining your dinner.

It was a little more like icing consistancy than frosting, which was fine with me, but if you want something with more body, add more butter.  Or sugar.  Or coconut, possibly.

So yesterday, March 14th, was Pi Day, as the truly geeky and/or pie lovers among us probably already knew.  One would think that given my penchant for baking some kind of dessert on the weekend and then eating it all weekend (this is why I don’t lose weight, seriously) I would be all over making some kind of awesome homemade pie.  But you would be wrong.

Pie crust terrifies me.  It’s sad but true.

So instead we made apple crisp.  I had accidently bought cooking apples (red romes, to be exact) instead of eating apples last week, and I still had four left.  Three went into this; I have one left and may make curried apples and couscous.  Or something.  I dunno.

This is my Mom’s recipe, much like most everything I bake, but I did make a couple of changes.  I used brown sugar instead of white granulated for the crisp part, and used a bit more cinnamon than was called for (probably a teaspoon and a half, rather than the teaspoon it called for)

Like most of Mom’s recipes, this one has a history:

Your grandmother, Granny, got this recipe from Mrs. John Vissering, Sr. The Visserings owned a grocery store in Minonk and also the store we always knew as Kurrles (sort of a department store). They were the first two stores as you rounded the corner to “downtown” from Granny’s house – about 2 block walk, though sometimes I went in the back door. I can remember Granny sending me to Visserings’, the store, before I was old enough to go to school. You would go in the store, all the floors were bare wood that had not been finished – you could see the sawdust they used for cleaning them – and you just told the clerk what you wanted and they got it for you. (You didn’t think I was that old, did you? LOL) Speaking of grocery stores, in the next block on “Main Street” was Chicago Butchers – Myrtle (Longman), who was like a Grandma to us, always shopped there. I remember that Ernie Moran or another of the butchers would always offer kids a hot dog. They were eaten cold – your mom was not a hot dog fan so I never took them up on the offer.

Place 4 cups sliced apples in casserole. Sprinkle with 1 tsp. cinnamon and add ½ cup of water.

Mix together 1 cup sugar, ¾ cup flour, and ½ cup butter. (I cut it like you do for a pie crust)

Sprinkle over apples and bake in a moderate oven (about 375F) until apples are tender (this was around 30 minutes, for me)

Serve with your favorite sauce or cream.

Yes, it’s pretty much the easiest recipe ever.

Apparently, some dude decided to be DEEPLY OFFENDED by the ubiquitous kosher salt, and so has produced Christian salt.  GAH.  I…I..I just have no words.  None.  Whatsoever.

Oh, wait, I found some.

First of all, IDIOT, salt is inherently kosher.  It just is, period.  Kosher salt could be more correctly called koshering salt, because it’s purpose is to aid in koshering meat.  Second, the reason it’s ubiquitous is because of it’s shape.  It has nothing to do with any approval from a rabbinical council.  Really.

And finally: did Christianity really need another idiot in the news? Really?

I don’t really consider myself a Christian anymore, though I have yet to make a complete break with the traditions I grew up with, and one of the reasons I’ve drifted away from it (besides it just not making sense to me anymore) is the proliferation of “Christians” like Joe Godlewski (truly an unfortunate surname if ever there was one).  It’s idiotic, offended-at-everything “Christians” like him that make it supremely unattractive to many.

Well.  That, and the militant, far right-wing, Christian contingent of the Republican party that’s been holding us all hostage for the last decade.

I have, like, five boxes of pasta that I haven’t used in 3 weeks because, well, I haven’t had enough cheese to make mac and cheese, I’m not in a pesto mood, and I had no spaghetti sauce – so obviously today’s project was a tomato sauce, made in the age-old method of tossing shit in a pot and cooking it together until it tastes good.  This was today’s version, and I’ll probably use the same stuff next time, maybe with some red wine if I have it in the house:

1 yellow onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

3 T (or so) olive oil

1-28 oz can crushed tomatoes

1-28 can diced tomatoes, drained

2 T tomato paste

1 t Penzey’s Pasta Sprinkle (or, barring that, the equivelant amount of oregano, basil, and thyme)

1/2 t hot red pepper flakes

2 bay leaves

1 T ground pepper

1/4 C grated romano pecorino cheese

Saute onion and garlic until soft and fragrant.  Stir in tomatoes, tomato paste, and all spices, and cook covered until at desired consistency.  Add cheese, and serve over hot pasta.

Occasionally, especially when life is being less than thrilling, I think about opening a small bakery/sweet shop in New York.  Since there’s no such thing as a budget in fantasyland, it would be either in the Village or one of the hypertrendy areas of Brooklyn – Williamsburg or Greenpoint maybe – and would be a cute little hole in the wall with a steady stream of hip young professionals who come in for old-fashioned cookies and treats.  I’d make raspberry muffins, chocolate chip pecan cookies, thumbprint cookies,  blueberry torte, and my Hershey’s syrup brownies.

And I’d definitely make the Heath Bar Crunch blondies I made this afternoon, because they are awesome.

Of course, I don’t really want to open a bakery, because it would be an insane amount of work, and I’m pretty happy having semiregular hours and time to sleep.  But it’s fun to imagine.

Here’s the recipe.  I would normally put this on my food blog, but, well.  It’s not like I use it enough to bother using it:

Heath Bar Crunch Blondies

1 ½ cups sifted flour
1 tsp. salt
2 cups brown sugar firmly packed
2 eggs slightly beaten
1 cup Heath Bar Crunch bits
2 tsp baking powder
½ cup vegetable shortening or lard
2 tsp. vanilla

Sift flour with baking powder and salt. Melt shortening, add it and sugar to flour mixture. Add eggs and nuts.

Mix and spread in a well-greased pan (9X13). Bake in a 350° oven for about 25 minutes. Cool and cut.

I baked in a 9×9 pan instead, and when I checked on them after 20 minutes, they were nowhere near done, so I left them at least another ten.

So last night, I spent the night shuddering under the covers, waking up once an hour between 2 am and 6 am, sneezing and coughing, and generally feeling miserable.  By 4, I decided there was no way in hell I was going into work that day, and I reset my alarm for 8, at which point I called in and then spent the rest of the day in bed, surfing the internet, reading Merlin fanfiction, and eating toast.

By tonight I was feeling mostly better, and I had a crazy craving for rice pudding, of all things.  Luckily, Smitten Kitchen had posted a recipe for it earlier this month.

I pretty much made it to her specifications…except I only had three cups of milk left (and now have none, so a grocery trip is in the near future) so my pudding was a little thicker and stickier.  I also added about a quarter teaspoon more almond extract because, in my opinion, there is no such thing as too much almond flavor in a dessert.  It was awesome.  It could have only been more awesome if I’d still had some dried cherries left to mix in, but I finished those off for lunch last weekend.

A possible future rice pudding alteration is with coconut milk – I’m pretty sure that would be terrific, but am still working out what other flavors to add to make it great.

I was in SoHo yesterday to get my hair cut, and I was a little early so I wandered a block over to Whole Foods to look around.  And yikes.

I mean, I hate chopping onions with every fiber of my being, but I’m not going pay $4 a pound for pre-chopped onions.  And $5? For dried pasta? Are they serious?  $8 a pound for ground beef?  I haven’t had so much sticker shock in a grocery store since I initially moved to the east coast.

All in all, even though commuting sucks, it made me glad that I choose to live in the suburbs.  Jersey City is less exciting than New York to be sure, but my rent is much lower and my grocery bill at Shop Rite is a lot smaller than it would be if I had to shop at Whole Foods instead.

I’ll be making bolognese sauce today.  If I’d gotten the ingredients at Whole Foods, I would have spent enough that I might as well have just gone out and ordered spaghetti bolognese at a restaurant.