Salted Caramel Chocolate Macaroon Cake

I always wanted to try making a cookie cake.  Well, always, as in once I saw one on Pinterest.  Here is my first attempt at a cookie cake.  No reason.  No Celebration.  No Holiday.  No Birthday.  I just really wanted to make a cookie cake.  I also wanted to try a new recipe for Salted Caramel Buttercream Frosting.  My new favorite flavor is Salted Caramel.  I am in the process of eating everything labeled Salted Caramel that I can get my hands on.  Bakeries Beware.  I'm on the hunt. 

Chocolate Cake

• 2 cups Sugar
• 1/2 cup Shortening
• 2 Eggs
• 2 tsp Vanilla
• 4 oz Unsweetened Chocolate, melted and cooled
• 2 cups of Flour
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
• 3/4 cup Water
• 3/4 cup Buttermilk
• Cream together sugar and shortening.  Add eggs, vanilla, and chocolate.  If the chocolate is still warm it seizes up and turns into chocolate chunks and is difficult to mix in.  Mix the dry ingredients together.  Mix water and buttermilk together.  Alternate adding dry and wet ingredients, starting and ending with wet until it is all incorporated.  Bake 350 degrees for about 30 min.
• Note:  Omit salt, baking soda, and baking powder if using 2 cups of Self Rising Flour instead.

Salted Caramel Frosting

• ¼ cup Sugar
• 2 Tbs water
• ¼ cup Heavy Cream
• 1 tsp Vanilla
• ½ cup Butter
• ½ tsp Sea Salt
• 1 package Dream Whip or some heavy cream to desired consistency
• 3 cups Powdered Sugar
• Stir together sugar and water in a saucepan over medium heat until it comes to a boil.  Cook for about 10 minutes without stirring until it become a nice amber color.  Remove from heat and slowly add cream and vanilla.  Let caramel cool for about 20 min.  In a separate bowl beat together butter and salt.  Add Dream Whip or heavy cream and beat until combined.  Beat in powdered sugar, then slowly add caramel and beat until light and fluffy.  Refrigerate.
  
  Note to self: Make a double batch next time so I have extra frosting to shamelessly eat, alone, at night, with a spoon.

Chocolate Macaroons

I am still new at making French Macaroons so I have not perfected these tricky little cookies yet.  

• 3/4 cup Almond Flour or Almond Meal.
• 1 cup Powdered Sugar or Confectioners sugar
• 2 Tbs Cocoa Powder
• Put this in a food processor and blend for 15+ seconds.  Sift into a separate container.  It needs to be a really fine powder. 
• 2 egg whites at room temperature.  Beat until they form soft peaks.
• 1/4 cup superfine sugar.
• Add 1 Tbs at a time to egg whites and beat until stiff peaks form and the mixture is glossy.
• Beat in 1/2 tsp vanilla or other flavoring or colors.
• Fold in 1/3 of almond-sugar powder into egg whites.  Repeat 1/3, repeat 1/3 until all the almond-sugar is folded into the egg white mixture.  The dough is thick and pasty at this point.  
• Stuff it into a piping bag and pipe out 25 - 30+ small circles onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet.  
• Let the cookies sit for 30 min at room temperature to set.  While waiting, heat oven to 325 degrees.  Bake on two baking sheet trays for 10 - 15 min.  Let cool for 10 min.

Note to self:  I made the cookies too big.  I think the cake would look cuter if I piped out smaller circles.  I am all about cute.  I also doubled the batch the macaroons just in case I ran out, but I made more than enough and just one batch would have worked.

I took this bad boy to my parent's house for dinner.  It is sort of our thing.  Every Sunday I visit my parents and Mom makes dinner and I bring dessert.  I try to make my dessert a surprise.  Mostly because I do not know until the last minute what I want to make.

Breakfast Scones

Bacon and Cheddar Scones.  This is a complete breakfast in one bite.  It has two of my favorite things:  Bacon and Cheese.  I am a big proponent of Bacon.  I love finding new ways to add Bacon to any dish.  Bacon makes everything better.  I love Bacon.

  Breakfast Scones

• 3 cups Flour
• 1 Tbs Baking Powder
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Pepper, unless you are like me and really really like pepper, then add 2 tsp
• 1 Stick (1/2 cup or 8 Tbs) Butter, cold and cubed
• 1 and 1/2 cup grated Cheddar Cheese
• 4 Green Onions, chopped
• 10 slices of Bacon, cooked, and chopped
• 1 cup Buttermilk, because buttermilk makes breakfast better
• Add dry ingredients together and with a pastry cutter or food processor cut in butter cubes.  Add cheese, green onions, bacon, and buttermilk.  Mix that all together and briefly knead the dough into ball, then flatten into a disk.  Cut out 8 - 10 wedges, or more if you like your scones thin.  Set the scones on a parchment paper covered sheet pan and give them a good egg wash (1 egg + 2 Tbs water, beaten).  Bake at 400 degrees for 18 - 20 min.

This is another one of my "encouraging J to play" Game Food dinners.  Tomb Raider is just that awesome.

I tried to get a close up of the bacon bits.  I had some left over this time and ate them for lunch all week.  Now that I am out I am thinking of making another batch just so I can take them to work with me for lunch.

Muffin Tin Mini German Pancakes

I love German Pancakes.  I grew up with Mom making  German Pancakes for dinner.  We got to pick our own toppings; sweet like powdered sugar or maple syrup and savory like cheddar and ham.  I also love German Pancakes because  they are a quick and easy meal, and good for when I have eggs and not much else.  Coming from a family that raised chickens, we had a lot of eggs (and sometimes not much else).  My parents still have chickens, though not as many as we had back then.  This was one of my favorite egg based dinners.  My  husband alas does not share  my enthusiasm for German Pancakes.  He comes from German stock but still thinks they are bland and boring so I try to change things up a bit for him.

German Pancake

6 Eggs
1 cup Milk
1 cup Flour
1 tsp Salt
Mix everything in a blender then pour into a buttered pan.  Bake at 350 degrees for 20 - 30 minutes.  Makes 2 dozen muffin tin mini German pancakes or one 9" x 12" pan.

Then while they are still hot I added some shredded cheddar cheese. Because I love Cheese.  I love cheddar Cheese.  I love all  Cheese. Cheese is worthy of much love. You should love cheese too. Just saying.

I sauteed some green onions and fried up some bacon bits and put that in the blender with the rest of the mix.  (note bacon is dense, bacon sinks to the bottom of the blender, do not do that again,instead add after blending and pouring). Pour the batter into buttered muffin tins and bake as usual.

Muffin tins makes almost everything Bite Sized.  Bite sized is cute.  I am all about cute. I identify and empathize with cute. Cute is good. Just saying.  Bite Sized is also perfect Game Food.  J has been playing the new Tomb Raider.  Really good game.  I encourage him to play by making bite sized dinners for him.

I left a dozen without cheese so we could try them with and without.  I was surprised, we actually ate two dozen in one sitting.  They were that good.  Good is good. I hope you agree.

Irish Soda Bread

I love quick breads.  I have a long and sordid history with yeast and bread making.  Other than the occasional burning accidents I have never had much trouble with baking these from scratch.  I rarely have two to three hours of time to spend watching yeast bread rise and I have not mastered, nor want to spend the time mastering the art of bread dough kneading.  My hands hurt for days afterwards.  Either I am kneading wrong, have not developed the stamina needed to kneading, or I have arthritis.  My only complaint with this quick bread recipe is that it does take a long time to bake, but the dough is easy enough with few ingredients.    

Irish Soda Bread (Herb and Cheese variety optional)

• 4 cups Flour
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1/2 tsp Sage
• 1/2 tsp Thyme
• 1/2 tsp Oregano
• 1/2 tsp Pepper
• 1 cup Shredded Cheese (Cheddar, Gruyere, Parmesan, Asiago, Romano, etc)
• 2 and 1/4 cup Buttermilk
• Combine dry ingredients.  Add buttermilk last.  Briefly knead dough together and form a ball.  Bake on parchment paper or a greased pan.  Cut an "X" in the top middle of the dough.  Bake at 450 degrees for 20 minutes, then turn the heat down to 400 degrees and continue baking for 25 - 30 minutes until the crust is nice and brown.

We made grilled cheese, bacon, and tomato sandwiches with ours.  Or you can just slice off chunks and eat it with some butter and honey.  It also makes for an excellent soup dipping bread.

Enjoy.

Lazy Man's Red Beans and Rice

I once heard somewhere (Alton Brown's "Good Eats" show) that Red Beans of Rice was the perfect dish because it has all the vitamins and nutrients you need.  I just find it a warm and tasty comfort food.  Craving such I looked up a few recipes on how to make it.

This is my pinterest inspiration.  I really need to work on my food photography skills, my background lighting is atrocious.  Anyway, this is what I wanted to make, but after looking at a few recipes I decided that they were all long and complicated and cooking beans takes forever.  This is what I ended up making, the lazy man's version of red beans and rice.

Lazy Man's Red Beans and Rice

• 1 can of Bush's Baked Beans or similar
• 1 Sausage - sliced
• 2 cups of Minute Rice
• A handful of Green Onions - chopped
• Heat a can of baked beans on the stove top.  In a separate pan heat up some sausage slices.  In a separate rice cooker make about 1 - 2 cups of rice.  At our house we love rice so I always make extra to snack on for later.  You can make this with pasta instead of rice Camilla.

Add the sausage to the baked beans and pour over a bowl of rice.  Garnish with some green onions for color and flavor.  I love all things onion.  For those Anime/Manga/Naruto fans out there that recognized the symbols on the bowls I was using, here they are without the food.  

J got them for me for Valentine's Day one year.  I always use Naruto (right) and J always gets Itachi (left).  I was crazy into Naruto a few years back.  Here I am in my cosplay Sakura costume with J on Halloween.  We went trick-or-treating.  I am currently reading "Bleach".  J has always been very supportive of my inner geek trends.  I was a closet nerd until I met him.

Lazy Man's Red Beans and Rice will now go on the list of favorite comfort foods that are easy to make.

Believe it!

Baklava Elephant Ears

Every once in a while my awesome job has a company pot luck BBQ.  They provide the meat (Spare Ribs this time) and there is a sign up sheet for side dishes in the lunch room.  I signed up for dessert.  It is sort of my thing right now.  Not always.  I brought drinks once.  I was craving Elephant Ears and Baklava so I combined them.  They went over very well as there were none left at the end of the day to take home with me.  But not to worry, J and I snacked on them fresh out of the oven before I brought them to work so they passed J's stringent Quality Control Parameters.  He is my expert Quality Assurance Manager.  They are not super sticky sweet as I am accustomed to making, but still really tasty and pretty easy to make.  The only hard part I think is waiting forever for the puff pastry to thaw before rolling it out and not burning them in the oven.

Baklava Elephant Ears

• 1/2 Butter, melted
• 2 Sheets of Puff Pastry, thawed
• 1/4 cup or so of Cinnamon and Sugar.  I did not measure this.
• Honey, again, not measuring it
• 1/2 cup Almonds
• 1/2 cup Walnuts
• 1/2 cup Pistachios
• Roll out and butter the puff pastry.  I used both sheets and made two batches.  Sprinkle Cinnamon-Sugar.  Sprinkle food processed nuts.  Drizzle honey on top.  Roll it up.  Cut it in 1 inch slices.  Bake each side at 450 degrees for 5 - 6 min each.  Watch it.  They are easy to burn.  

Roll out the Puff Pastry and butter it up.

Food processor the Baklava nut trio:  Walnuts, Almonds, and Pistachios.

Sprinkle Cinnamon-Sugar on the buttered pastry.

Sprinkle half the nuts.  Save the other half for the next puff pastry sheet.

Drizzle honey over the nuts and roll it up starting at the two edges and roll towards the middle until the two ends touch.

Cut off one inch thick slices.

Set the slices on a parchment paper covered baking sheet.  Dab some more melted butter on top of the rolls.

Bake at 450 degrees for 6 minutes on one side, take them out of the oven and flip them over to bake for another 5 - 6 minutes on the other side.  I used tongs to flip them.

They taste good hot out of the oven and cooled down the next day.

Enjoy.

T-Rex:  "I am best Dinosaur there is!"
Allosaurus:  "Oh ya, want to arm wrestle?"
Get it, cause Allosaurus has bigger front limbs than T-Rex and they were actually useful for tackling prey.  J made that one up.  Thought I would try it out on the blog.

Tangled Birthday Cake

My sister asked me to make a Birthday cake for her baby girl, Illianna, who turned three this month.  She is currently into the movie "Tangled" and watches it all the time.

Here is my Tangled Birthday Cake.  A chocolate chocolate cake with fondant.

Chocolate Cake

• 2 cups Sugar
• 1/2 cup Shortening
• 2 Eggs
• 2 tsp Vanilla
• 4 oz Unsweetened Chocolate, melted and cooled
• 2 cups of Flour
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1 tsp Baking Soda
• 1/2 tsp Baking Powder
• 3/4 cup Water
• 3/4 cup Buttermilk
• Cream together sugar and shortening.  Add eggs, vanilla, and chocolate.  If the chocolate is still warm it seizes up and turns into chocolate chunks and is difficult to mix in.  Mix the dry ingredients together.  Mix water and buttermilk together.  Alternate adding dry and wet ingredients, starting and ending with wet until it is all incorporated.  Bake 350 degrees for about 30 min.
• Note:  Omit salt, baking soda, and baking powder if using 2 cups of Self Rising Flour instead.

She was so excited for her birthday cake.

She just wanted to pick at it so much.

Chocolate Frosting

• 1/2 cup butter (1 stick) softened
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 1 tsp Vanilla
• 4 cups Powdered Sugar
• 3/4 cup Cocoa Powder
• 2 - 4 Tbs Whipping Cream
• Whip together shortening, butter, and vanilla.  Add powdered sugar 1 cup at a time until incorporated.  Add Cocoa Powder and whipping cream until you get the right consistency.  In the center I sprinkled a few chocolate chips to give it a crunch.

Now to open presents.

I love taking pictures of people taking pictures.  I find it amusing.  She got a wooden block train.  Good luck ever putting that back together.

She has mastered the art of unwrapping at Christmas.  It was her favorite part.

Here is her daddy, Steve, putting together her new baby doll stroller.  Apparently she loved the last one to death.

Since they are expecting a new baby brother in April they decided to get Illianna a double baby doll stroller to get used to the idea of having two babies.

Two mini mouse dolls going for their first stroller ride.

So cute.  I am sure she will make an amazing big sister.