mint birthday cake

Well, I'm all moved in and as settled into my new apartment as I am going to get.  The kitchen is a lot bigger, but I haven't really taken much advantage of it since moving in.  I'm still eating mostly cereals and pastas because I am terrible.

I did, however, get my act together enough to whip up a special birthday cake.  The birthday boy in question is fond of chocolate and mint, so I scoured the internet to try to find a mint chocolate cake.  I never really found anything that was close to what I was looking for, so I combined several recipes into one to suit my needs.

I wasn't quite ready to try my hand at making a cake from scratch, so I went looking for a boxed chocolate cake mix.  I ended up with Devil's Food because stores don't seem to sell just "chocolate cake" mix any longer.  I think in the future, I would pick something that was more chocolatey, like chocolate fudge cake.

I followed the directions on the box and made two round nine inch layers.  During the mixing process, I added a tiny bit (maybe half a teaspoon) of peppermint extract because I was worried that the frosting wouldn't be minty enough, but this turned out to be unnecessary and I would actually advise against it, especially if using the devil's food flavored cake.  It wasn't bad tasting, I just think it would have been better and more subtle without the extra mint flavoring.

To go between the two layers, I made my own mint frosting.

Mint Frosting
- 1 stick of butter (8 tablespoons), softened
- 2 cups confectioner's sugar
- 1 teaspoon peppermint extract
- 1 tablespoon water *

Mix all ingredients in a bowl and beat until whipped and fluffy.
* I found that 1 tablespoon of water was not nearly enough and butter/sugar was flying everywhere when I was using my hand mixer.  I poured in more water until it softened everything up and created a frosting-like consistency while I was blending.

After spreading that on top of the bottom layer, I placed the top layer on it and used a serrated knife to level the cake.  I chose just a plain chocolate frosting to go over the cake and then decorated it with some white piping.  It wasn't quite as tasty as a thin mint, but it was well-received and a good starting point if I wanted to improve upon the recipe in the future.

I ended up having to freeze a good portion of this cake.  I cut into slices, put each slice in the freezer for about 10-15 minutes or just long enough to harden the frosting, and then wrapped each slice first in plastic wrap and then aluminum foil before throwing them in a Zip-Lock bag.  Here's hoping it keeps well.

hiatus

I'm moving on the 11th.  Until then, it is highly unlikely that I will make any food. Come back after I'm all settled.

Bertucci's olive oil

My motivation to cook anything has hit an all-time low lately.  I haven't really been eating anything besides pasta for dinner.  With an impending move in the works, I will also have to start the process of eating whatever food I have left in my apartment so that I don't have to move it.  I foresee a lot of rice in my near future.

This weekend, I went to Bertucci's for dinner.  I will be feasting on the leftover pizza for the next few days (since I somehow ended up with almost an entire large pizza given to me... ahem) and found one of their free rolls in the box of pizza.  I, presumably like most people eating at Bertucci's, enjoy their rolls quite a bit.  Even more, I like the olive oil that they bring along with it.

Image from This Is Framingham

Over the past few years, I've purchased several brands of "garlic infused olive oil" in the hopes of recreating the experience at home.  Last night, I gave making my own a whirl to make the idea of eating a cold and slightly stale roll slightly more appealing.  Luckily (or perhaps unfortunately, as this does not make for a particularly entertaining read), mixing up an olive oil requires nothing that can burn or cut me.  It turned out surprisingly well and I think I'll be heading off to the grocery store during my lunch break this afternoon to pick up some rolls to go along with my rice for dinner.


Garlic Olive Oil
I didn't measure anything, so all seasonings are to taste
- extra virgin olive oil
- garlic powder
- garlic salt (Whole Foods makes a really tasty one with sea salt)
- red pepper flakes
- Parmesan cheese

Place olive oil in a bowl.  Mix in the above ingredients.  I was surprised at how the olive oil took to the garlic powder.  A+.

betty crocker

I mostly save my cake eating for birthdays.  Occasionally, I will bake cupcakes.  I bought cake tins a few years ago and, like most of my kitchen gadgets, have only been used two or three times.  Mostly for birthdays and once for those Pillsbury cinnamon buns that come in the vacuum-sealed tube.  Like my favorite homemade coffee cake, I seem to only feel comfortable making and eating cake for some sort of holiday or celebration.  Sometimes, however, I just feel like eating a cake.


I am not yet as skilled (read: motivated) as to bake a cake from scratch and Betty Crocker cake mix was on sale at Target for $1.  I bought a gold cake mix and a tub of chocolate frosting (a departure from my usual buttercream/cream cheese frosting fixation).  I made a point not to buy the whipped frosting, as it is the same price for frosting that has been injected and whipped with air.  So far, everything is going smoothly.

Once home, I place the ingredients and all needed out on my butcher block.  I set out my cake pans and poured the cake batter into them.  So far, so good.  I run into a little trouble when I realize both cake tins can't fit completely flat in my miniature oven, but that's okay.  I make do.  My kitchen timer goes off and I take the pans out of the oven to cool.  Everything looks fine.  After a while, I remember that I have cake cooking and try to get them out of the pans.

I was fooled by Wilson's.  Non-stick nonsense.  I run a knife along the edges and assume the cakes will flop out like usual.  Instead, the cake does not budge.  I slide my hands gently under the cakes, prying them away from the bottom of the pans.  The first one crumbles, but I figure I will just stick that one at the bottom and we'll be none the wiser.  We'll just cover that bad boy in frosting.

I take the frosting from the shopping bag and am alarmed at how light the canister is.  I take a look at the label.  Whipped!  How did that happen?!  I angrily throw it in the microwave and smear it cover my broken cake bits.  Now comes the top layer.

 This doesn't go much better.  I think this picture pretty much sums it up:

I try to patch it up by using frosting as an adhesive.  It looks kind of okay at this point.  I go to cut a piece later in the evening and the entire thing crumbles to bits.

Just so this entry isn't so depressing; here's a completely normal looking cake that my sister made for my dad's birthday:

chicken

It should be pretty apparent by now that I am a fairly lazy individual.  I'd be totally satisfied eating frozen food every day and, frankly, I'm completely surprised that I'm still attempting to make my own food.  I had sort of assumed that this project would fall by the wayside shortly after I started it.  Sure, I haven't been the best at making a new recipe every week (or even making anything at all some weeks) but just the fact that I'm still going with this and have become more adventurous with food has been a source of pride for me.

That said, there are some things I just can't get behind.  Making your own mayonnaise, homemade bread (I am sure this is delicious but it seems like a lot of work.  You know what's good?  Bread from the store bakery.  It's only like $3 and costs me 0 hours of time.), and roasting your own chickens.

I love roasted chicken.  It was one of my favorite meals when I lived at my parents' house and it seemed like we had it once a week for a while.  I spent the first three years of living on my own without any roasted chicken in my life.  I had a roasting pan, but no drive to do anything with it.  I finally gave up and got rid of the roasting pan when I moved into my current apartment and it wasn't until last year that I realized that those rotisserie chickens from the grocery store are a god-send.  They are tasty, versatile, require minimal effort, and feed me for days.  This is made even sweeter by the fact that they are only $5 on Fridays at Stop & Shop.  Even so, a rotisserie chicken costs, what, $6-7?  You know what else costs $6-7?  A raw chicken that you then have to cook yourself.  I don't really get off on crafting the perfect rub of herb and spices for my chicken and so the "all natural" flavor works just fine.  It's flexible in the sense that I can then take pieces of that chicken and make many other dishes with it.

One of my favorite roasted chicken leftovers is chicken salad sandwiches.  I tend to err on the side of easy and bland when I make food, so I'm not even going to bother with a recipe.  I bought a nice baguette from the store, placed leftover chicken on it, slathered it with mayonnaise (I don't even mix it ahead of time now because I don't like how the mayonnaise soaks into the chicken over time) and topped it with a layer of almost but not quite wilted baby spinach.  It's easy enough that I can make it in my zombied before-work daze or throw it together for dinner quickly when I get home from work.

pancakes

I should know better.  All my talk of breakfast foods inspired me to make some pancakes last night.  Now, I grew up in a household where Bisquick was never used and we'd only settle for authentic buttermilk pancakes.  My dad would whip up the batter and my mom would heat up the electric griddle and they'd be thick and fluffy and wonderful.

Again, I am lazy and cheap.  I also don't really like buying buttermilk because I end up throwing most of it away after a few weeks because, sure, I can totally make some more biscuits/pancakes but I can't tell if it's gone bad because it smells so darn awful in the first place.  I originally went to the store to buy Bisquick for a recipe for imitation Red Lobster biscuits (yeah, that's right.) but ended up buying Jiffy mix because it was $2 cheaper and I'm taken in by its vintage-styled packaging and blue gingham tablecloth in the picture.  I love me some gingham.

I was quizzing my coworkers on what to make for dinner when I realized that I could make pancakes with this mix.  I really should know not to trust anything where every recipe on the back includes a few scoops of mix and a few cups of milk.  And that's it.  This same "recipe" could make me pancakes, waffles, biscuits, and the topping for some chicken casserole.  But I gave it a whirl anyway.

I wasn't discouraged when the first pancake turned out to be a disaster.  If I know anything about cooking, it is that the first pancake is always a mess and you end up throwing it away.  So I kept going.  The batter tended to rise up instead of out, so the outsides would burn before the insides even started cooking.  I tried spreading out the batter in the frying pan, but towards the end, the batter had already started to thicken and rise in the bowl.  I ended up with 5 or 6 burnt/raw biscuit-like discs.  All the maple syrup in the world couldn't make this alright.

a tribute to breakfast cereal

I'd like to take a break from trying new recipes to talk about my old stand-by, cereal.  Cereal has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember.  All kinds of cereal.  Healthy cereal, hot cereal, cold cereal, sugary cereal, cereal with milk, and lately, even dry cereal.  I have trouble defining my favorite food, as I can't seem to eat anything I'm not in the mood for.  Cereal is really the only food that I can eat at literally any time of the day and is often the only thing I can stomach when I'm not feeling well.

On a whole, I'd say that breakfast foods are my favorite genre of food.  Let me indulge myself momentarily and make a list of breakfast foods that I love: french toast, waffles, hash browns, pancakes, muffins, danish, donuts, bagels, english muffins, crumpets, cinnamon buns, home fries, toast, yogurt, eggs, little sausages, croissants, pastries, and granola.  My idea of bliss is going on vacation and being welcomed by a free hotel breakfast buffet.  The problem is that I can't eat a lot of these things first thing in the morning.  If I actually eat french toast and eggs for breakfast, I end up feeling queasy, lethargic, and greasy for the rest of the day.  Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any breakfast for dinner buffets (perhaps this should be my new business Life Plan?).

But this is where cereal comes in.  I can stomach cereal in the morning.  It very rarely makes me feel sick (with the exception of some delicious vanilla granola from Trader Joe's that starts making me sick after I've been eating it for a few days) and can actually act as a buffer layer between waking up and all of those delicious but heavy food items I listed above.  Much to the dismay of my family and boyfriend, I can happily eat cereal for dinner and be totally satisfied.

I eat a bowl of cereal almost every morning for breakfast.  Lately, I've been really into Kashi's Go Lean Crunch.  Something about the hard stick-like texture is really appealing to me.  I recently had a brief rekindled love affair with Frosted Mini Wheats after developing a fondness for eating them raw and by the handful.  My favorite cereal is Rice Krispie Treats with the discontinued Sprinkle Spangles a close second (my heart/mouth ache for you, Sprinkle Spangles).

So this entry goes out to you, cereal.  Thanks for the good times.

Original photo from here.  Sorry for ruining it.

road cookies

It has only been relatively recently that I have realized that I have had a latent interest in using cooking to show affection.  I have never really had much interest in cooking or baking up until this past year (and even now I'm not entirely sure how much of this "interest" I have is based on anything other than having something to do), but being able to have some sort of tangible evidence of my affection and effort I have put into making something for someone else is satisfying.  Sharing my baking with others also has some other nice selfish benefits: I don't have to eat 72 cookies myself (and gain 400 pounds), I get to try new recipes I wouldn't otherwise make, and it gives me something to spend my ample free time on.

I wanted to make cookies that could be given as a gift and transported across many state lines.  The plan was to use my stand-by recipe for chocolate chip cookies adopted from my mother (using vanilla pudding mix in the dough to make them extra moist).  However, scheduling issues arose and it turned out that the cookies needed to be baked much sooner than I thought.  I came home on Thursday with the realization that I both did not have vanilla pudding and that my brown sugar was in the form of a brick and still I had not found out how to soften it without turning it into mush or bought new sugar.  I considered giving up and just buying cookies at the store.  The sentiment would still be the same, but it always feels cheap to me to cop out and not put forth the effort to actually make something for someone.

Google to the rescue.  I figured that it would be a lost cause, but I did a quick search for "chocolate chip cookies without brown sugar."  I wasn't expecting any results.  As far as I was concerned, brown sugar and butter were pretty much the foundation for chocolate chip cookies and anything else would be a poor substitute.  I warily printed out a recipe that called for honey instead of brown sugar and decided it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

So I did.  The dough formed and everything seemed to go fine, but the cookies spread out like crazy during baking.  I'm sure some more experienced baker would be able to point out something I could have added to make them more firm, but alas.  I used my spatula to break them into smaller cookies, all the while assuming I would have to throw away the entire batch.

Like most things I make, these things look pretty questionable but they taste fine.  The honey adds an interesting extra layer of flavor, and while I don't think that I'd make these every time, they are an excellent substitute for the more traditional brown sugar based cookies.

No Brown Sugar Chocolate Chip Cookies
recipe from Spark Recipes

Ingredients
•    2 1/2 cups all-purose flour

•    2 eggs

•    1 teaspoon vanilla extract

•    3/4 teaspoon salt

•    1 teaspoon baking soda

•    6 ounces chocolate chips (I used a combination of milk & semisweet)
•    1 cup white sugar

•    2 tablespoons honey

•    1 1/4 cups butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.


Cream the butter with the sugar and the honey.
Stir in the eggs and vanilla.
Add the flour and baking soda.
Stir in chocolate chips.


Place teaspoon sized dough about 2 inches apart on an ungreased baking sheet.


Bake at 375 degrees F for 10 minutes or until golden brown.

grill, meet hamburger

Perhaps I was too hard on the personal grill in my last entry.  During a recent trip to the grocery store, I purchased some short-dated hamburger patties (I know.  You are saying to yourself "Now wait a minute, she's eating red meat?  And what is this that I'm reading about short-dated red meat?  Am I on the right blog?  Kelly?"  Do not worry, friends.  This purchase was influenced by the $2 off manager's coupon stuck to the packaging and the promise that I could always just freeze the patties instead of consuming them all in one night.)  The original plan was to cook them as I always had: thrown in a frying pan over medium heat until cooked on either side, and then cover and put over low heat until cooked thoroughly.  Once home, I thought I would give the grill another chance.  My burns have healed.  Maybe we could be friends.

I sliced each patty in half to create 8 smaller patties instead of 4 behemoth patties.  Each sad-patty got wrapped in aluminum foil and tossed in a Ziploc bag to go in the freezer.  I'm really trying to master this cooking for one thing, and I think I might be on the right track.  It's taken me over 6 months to realize that if I cook an entire pound of meat at one time, then chances are that I will either tire of eating it or it will go bad before the week's end.  The short-dated hamburger represents saving money and not wasting so much food.

So I fired up the grill to just make one hamburger.  This would never be possible with a regular grill.  In fact, we rarely used the charcoal grill we had sitting on the porch last summer because I was often told that I didn't have enough to cook on it to make all the effort worth it.  Well, fine.  Jokes on you, because now I can have a hamburger whenever I want.

It was a success.  No burns were sustained, no grease flew anywhere, and a hamburger was done in mere moments.  I had a nice roll, some sliced red onions, a mix of mayonnaise and ketchup, and a bed of baby spinach for the hamburger to rest upon.  I've made a couple since then, relishing in the fact that I don't have to eat a hamburger for 5 days straight just because I bought a pound of meat.  Progress.

grilled chicken

The Christmas griddle was finally removed from its resting place under my butcher block and was used over the weekend.  I was originally going to do a another slow-cooker recipe this week, but I was feeling a little sorry (and guilty) for the Christmas gift that I have neglected for the past three months.  I read with trepidation the meager instructions it came with: turn on, wait for light to turn green, place food on grill, close top, remove food, eat.  I turned it on.

One of my favorite food stand-by's is Italian-dressing marinated grilled chicken.  Since I've moved away from home, I've had to satisfy myself with marinating the chicken and then baking it in the oven, which is certainly not as good as chicken fresh from the grill.  Since I am now in possession of my very own personal grill, I thought that Italian-marinated chicken would be an excellent inaugural choice.

As the grill warmed up, my kitchen was filled with the smell of melting plastic.  The instructions told me that this was normal and that I should just let the grill do its thing and the smell would dissipate over time (lie).  I retrieved my bag of marinated thin-sliced chicken breasts from the fridge and waited for the light on the grill to turn green, indicating that it was now safe to use.  It should also be known that the grill has three heating settings: low, medium, and high.  The instructions weren't clear about what setting would be ideal for my situation, so I chose "medium."  It seemed like the safest choice - not too hot, and hopefully warm enough to kill any salmonella.

I was feeling pretty confident at this point.  Once the grill had heated up, I grabbed a chicken breast and attempted to gently place it on the hot grill plates.  Here is where my confidence wavers and the story takes a dark turn.  I wasn't expecting grease to splatter so quickly from the meat onto my bare arms, but it did.  I leapt back from the grill after throwing the lid down on the chicken.  I was unclear as to how long I was supposed to leave the chicken to cook, so I approached carefully with one oven mitt on and a meat thermometer in the other hand.  Over time, I got very good at throwing the chicken down on the grill, slamming the lid closed, and leaping away while moaning in despair.

I sustained many burns that evening.

Italian Marinated Grilled Chicken

• Half bottle of Italian dressing.
• 1 lb chicken breasts (any size)
• Sandwich fixin's (ciabatta bread, baby spinach, mayonnaise, red onion in my case)

1. Marinate the chicken at least overnight in the Italian dressing.  I usually just throw it in a Ziploc bag and throw it in the fridge.
2. Cook chicken on grill.
3. Make sandwiches