Chocolate Bliss

As usual, I am delayed on my posts. I officially completed my undergraduate education at The University of Texas at Austin, so hopefully will have the summer to write a couple more blog posts. I'm just hoping that I will find time to write when I start my new job as a commodities trader. I've heard horror stories about the hours, but I've also heard it's not as bad as investment bankers. I have my fingers crossed. But back to the baking.

During Christmas, I visited my boyfriend and his family in Allen, TX about 30 minutes from Dallas. His sister was celebrating her 17th birthday, so I thought it would be nice to bake a cake for her. After searching on the internet for about an hour for an idea, I realized that she was picky so I opted for a chocolate cake.

I remembered from my first internship, one of my co-workers brought a chocolate sour cream bundt cake that was extremely moist. I loved how it wasn't like other bundt cakes that I tried that are sometimes grainy and dry, so I looked for a chocolate sour cream cake recipe on the internet. I found one at Cooks.com and was pleased with the result. I always appreciate the simplicity of their recipes, and this one was no different.

Chocolate Sour Cream Cake

• 4 eggs
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 cups sour cream
• 3 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• dash of cinnamon
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1/3 cup water

Beat eggs and sugar together until light; add sour cream and dry ingredients.

Dissolve cocoa in warm water and add to batter.

Pour into 3 greased 9-inch layer pans.

Bake at 350°F until a toothpick inserted in center of cake comes out clean (about 25-30 minutes).

Because I was layering this cake, I needed some fillings. I decided one layer would be filled with a chocolate ganache and another would be filled with a white chocolate cream. Both are fairly simple and worth the extra few minutes to make your cake absolutely scrumptious. The chocolate ganache increases the moisture and the white chocolate cream is a light, fluffly filling that gives your tongue a taste of something other than chocolate.

Chocolate ganache

• 9 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 1 cup heavy cream

Heat heavy cream over medium heat. Let it come to a boil but be sure to watch it as it will easily boil over the pot.

Pour the cream over the chocolate and stir until smooth and glossy.

Because ganache is a little runny, you can pipe a rim of frosting before you pour the ganache on one of your layers. I didn't need to, but you can do this to safeguard your cake. The layer of frosting will act as a barrier to prevent it from leaking through the cake.

White Chocolate Cream

• 2.5 cups whipping cream
• 16 oz. white chocolate
• 1/4 cup milk

Pour milk over white chocolate and melt.

Stir in whipping cream and beat until fluffy.

I used a soft spatula to spread the white chocolate cream in between the top and middle layer. To make things easier on myself, I bought a tub of whipped chocolate frosting and frosted the rest of the cake. To decorate, I used the chocolate frosting and the white chocolate cream to pipe stars around the edges with a Wilton 16 tip. Using the Wilton combed triangle tool, I created a pattern in the top of the cake to cover up any imperfections. I pressed mini chocolate chips into the side to finalize decorations.

And no chocolate cake is the same without chocolate-dipped strawberries. I used the Baker's melting chocolate that comes in the microwavable container so you can instantly dip your fruit. I layed them out on wax paper and stuck them in the refrigerator until hardened and placed them neatly around the cake. Be sure to refrigerate this cake before serving or else the chocolate on the strawberries will melt and the heavy cream and whipping cream in the fillings may go bad.

All in all, this was a very tasty cake. It was more dense and rich than I expected, but a great way to finish off a birthday meal. Although it did take 4 hours to complete, it was time well spent. Being able to see people enjoy something you make is always a pleasure.

In my next post, look forward to the creations I make through my Wilton Course 1 class. I will soon be a cake decorating queen!

Black Forest Cupcakes

Cupcakes are great for various reasons. They are easy to transport, single-serving sized to help control consumption (or so I tell myself), and give you a mouthful of frosting with each bite. I have always been a huge cake fan, so I naturally love the miniature version of the 12-inch round.

I wanted to bring some sort of dessert to my co-workers one day and after going through various options through my head, came to the decision that the cupcake would be the best idea. Because I wanted to feed about 30 people, I knew it would be the easiest because it would be simple to carry and people could grab a treat and go.

I decided to make a black forest cupcake because I knew I wanted to make something that was chocolate. This recipe is one of my favorites because it contains a little surprise when you bite into the cupcake. Not only do you get the cream cheese frosting on the top, but each cupcake is layered with cream cheese frosting and a cherry in the center. Additionally, the cake is soaked with the juice from maraschino cherries to give each bite of chocolate a kick of cherry. I adapted the cupcake recipe from Kraft Foods. The frosting was taken from Simply Recipes.

Ingredients:

Cupcake & Filling

• 1 pkg. chocolate cake mix
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 1 can cherry filling
• 1 jar maraschino cherries

Frosting

• 2 - 8 oz. cream cheese
• 2 sticks butter
• 4-6 cups powdered sugar
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 chocolate bar of choice, shaved

Preheat oven to 350 and prepare cake mix as directed on box. Pour half of maraschino cherry juice from jar into batter. In a separate bowl, mix cream cheese, egg, and sugar for filling.

Fill prepared cake batter into lined cupcake tray until each liner is 1/3 full. Spoon 1 tbsp filling mixture onto cake batter mixture. Use cherry pie filling on top of cream cheese mixture. Fill remainder of cupcake liner with cake batter.

Bake for 20-25 minute. Cool for 5 minutes.

Mix butter and cream cheese for frosting. After well mixed, slowly pour in vanilla extract and powdered sugar. Continue adding powdered sugar to reach desired sweetness and consistency.

Decorate cooled cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and chocolate shavings. Top with a maraschino cherry.

This is a fun, little dessert if you're looking for something different and simple. It's also a great way to make new friends at work - everyone loves the girl who brings treats to share. From my past experience, I have learned that people gravitate to free baked goods on someone's desk. And if they're going to take a dessert, they're bound to stop and chat for a while. So if you love baking but not eating your creations like me, why not give it to your friends at work? You get the enjoyment of making, they get the enjoyment of eating. It's a win-win situation for all.

Monkeyin' Around

The male howler monkey's cry can be heard for 10 miles, making it the loudest land animal in the world.

Monkeys yawn not only when they are tired, but also when they are mad.

Monkeys do not catch colds, but orangutangs, chimps, and gorillas all do.

Curious little critters, those monkeys. Strange to think that we are all part of the hominidae family. Because we, according to science, are so closely related to furry, banana-eating animals, this post is dedicated to all the monkeys in the world. But in all honesty, this post is about monkeys because I realized that I had pictures of two monkey desserts that I had made in the past and never posted about.

One of my roommates loves monkeys, so for her past 2 birthdays, I have made two simple monkey desserts. The first were banana nut cupcakes, decorated to look like monkeys. The recipe was taken from Betty Crocker: Baking for Today.

• 1/3 cup milk
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 1 egg
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup light brown sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup mashed, ripe bananas
• 1/3 cup dried cranberries
• 1/3 cup toasted walnuts, chopped
  
  

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Line muffin pan with cupcake liners
3. Beat milk, oil, eggs, and mashed bananas.
4. Stir in flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt until well mixed. The mixture will be lumpy.
5. Fold in cranberries and walnuts.
6. Bake 20-25 minutes

To decorate, I used the following ingredients:

• 1 tub chocolate frosting
• chocolate chips
• Strawberry Twizzlers (Pull-n-Peel)
• Nilla wafers, halved
• Mini oreos
• Red frosting
• Sprinkles, optional

After the cupcakes have cooled, spread the chocolate frosting on the cupcakes. I used chocolate chips for the eyes and sprinkles for the nose, but you can use the chips for both if

you like. The ears are mini Oreos and the mouth is half of a Nilla wafer. For the lips, I used red frosting to stick a Twizzler onto the wafer.

I liked this recipe because 1) it was easy 2) it was fun and 3) it plays up the monkey idea with the bananas

So this year for my roommate's birthday, I wanted to make another monkey dessert, but knew that it should be something different. My other roommate and I decided that we would make a monkey cake.

We figured this would be more of a cake valued for its visual appeal rather than its taste, so we focused more on the decorating than anything else. With that said, we used a store-bought chocolate cake mix.

After baking the cake in two 9-in round cake pans according to the box's instructions, we popped the cake pans into the freezer. This is a trick I use when I am icing a cake in a rush because it prevents the cake from crumbling during the frosting process. Additionally, it makes the cake easier to carve into whatever shape needed; in thise case, a monkey's face. One thing to note is that you must be careful if you decide to put your cake into the freezer. Leaving it in there for too long will draw out the moisture and result in a dry cake. I usually leave it in there for no more than 10-15 minutes.

Here are the decorating ingredients to make this monkey cake:

• chocolate frosting (I prefer the whipped kind for easy spreading)
• white frosting
• Oreos
• Twizzlers Pull-N-Peel
• Chocolate chips

After we pulled the cake out of the freezer and popped them out of their cake pans, we frosted the first layer with a healthy layer of chocolate frosting and then topped it off with the second layer. We then used a long, serrated knife and carved the shape of a monkey's face. To do this, we left the bottom half untouched and carved a hill shape into the top half.

We frosted the top half of the cake, leaving space to frost with the white frosting for the monkey's mouth region. I recommend outlining the area that you want to frost with white and then using the chocolate to close in the gaps.

For the eyes, we outlined with white frosting to avoid the Oreos from blending in with the rest of the monkey's face. His ears are Oreos as well. Chocolate chips make the nostrils and a Twizzler was used for his lips. We used chocolate sprinkles to give him some hair and coated some Twizzlers with chocolate frosting to give him tufts of hair at the top of his head.

If you notice, many of the decorating ingredients are the same for both of these monkey desserts. It'd be extremely easy to make both and prevent buying an entire bag of chocolate chips or Twizzlers and not use all of them. If you decide to make both at the same time, I recommend using the same mix for both (ie: banana nut for cupcakes and cake or chocolate for cupcakes and cake)

As I was looking through my folder of food pictures, I realized that I like baking things that are visually shocking (remember the Tofurkey post?) I guess these two desserts fall into that category.

Now I have one year to think of a new monkey dessert for next year's birthday. Monkey bread? We'll see.

Is That Tofurkey?

I posted a couple of months ago with a link to ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com.  I submitted something that a friend and I made, hoping it will make it into their book or on the website.  Seeing that the other things are all so ridiculous, I figure mine isn't ridiculous enough.  So, in case our creation never makes it into the book or on their page, I'm going to post our creation in this blog.

I feel it is very necessary to provide some background on this.  I am part of a student organization called Business Council, which is basically the student voice of the business school.  It is composed of 101 students from the student body, and within that group, we are divided into "families".  Each family has parents, and I was a "mother" of a family.  

Each year around Thanksgiving, Business Council hosts a "family" potluck for its members, where each family is assigned a dish to which they are responsible for supplying the other families.  Being an avid baker, (my "husband" and I baked weekly for our "family"), we were appropriately assigned desserts.  We really wanted to shock everyone, so we decided that we would make a gigantic cake in the shape of a turkey.  I had seen some pictures online of glazed turkey cakes, but we decided this would be too complicating for us.  So we basically made up our own concoction.  

We bought 4 boxes of yellow cake mix and prepared them like normal in rectangular pans.  After layering them, we carved it into the shape of a turkey.  We were pretty impressed with how accurate we got the shape, so we decided to begin icing.  Little did we know, making brown icing has got to be one of the hardest things ever.  We started mixing every color together, hoping it would give us a nice, dark brown, but we ended up with a pale, nasty pinkish brown.  We kept trying for about 20 minutes until I found some cocoa powder in my cupboard and decided to just use that as a final dusting to give it a brown finish.  So we used the colored icing that we made and lightly dusted the cake.  We even cut little booties for the turkey legs and placed vegetables around it to give it the visual appeal of a Thanksgiving gobbler.  

We arrived to the potluck with our turkey cake and set it on the end of the table where the other desserts were.  Many were impressed, but others were confused.  "Why is that turkey sitting by the desserts?" "Is that a TOFURKEY!?"  Pictures were shot, jaws were dropped, and we just smiled.  We definitely shocked everyone like we intended, and it was a heck of a lot of fun.

While this turkey cake wasn't as beautiful as we envisioned it, it was still pretty darn close to looking like a turkey.   And it may have only tasted like a normal yellow cake dusted with cocoa powder, but our "family" appreciated all the hard work that went into it.  I'd say we spent probably a total of 4 hours preparing it, which provided us good bonding time.  And besides, preparing a (real) turkey is no simple task.  

I'd be impressed to see our turkey cake in a book or on ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com.  Maybe I'll be as shocked as the other "families" at the potluck when they first laid eyes on our dessert/entree(?).  

Chicago Dog

Last month, I made another trip to Chicago. In a recent post, I talked about Lou Malnati's in the windy city and mentioned how I didn't have enough time to try a Chicago dog. I made it a must-do on my list this time around. Fortunately, I got a hot dog in the ultimate American setting - at a Chicago Cubs game.

I'm not exactly a hot dog fan. There's something about scrap meat jammed into a clear casing that doesn't lead me to salivation. But perhaps I was in the right mood, right setting, and right level of starvation that this Chicago dog left me lapping up my drool like a dachshund.

I opted for pretty much everything on the dog to get the full experience. The price tag to gobble one of these was pretty high, but I guess that's what you pay to eat the all-American fa(s)t food during an all-American pasttime. I wouldn't say it's worth the price, but it's definitely a lot better than the dog I've had off the cart in New York or the ones my family grills at home. My family isn't big on hot dog grilling, but your family may put Wrigley Field's hot dog business to shame.

The first bite had a beautiful snap that any good hot dog should have, and it had a bit of a spicy taste. I thought the heat married nicely with the cold tomatoes and my mouth appreciated the texture and heartiness of the chili. This dog was much longer than any other dog that I had ever seen anywhere else, so it was quite filling. I ordered a side of fries (I decided to indulge and make my body hate me) with the dog and left that stadium stuffed. If you're a small person with a regular appetite, I would recommend just getting the dog. It'll fill you pretty well.

I had some other food adventures during this trip in Chicago, but I will write about those in a later post. There are so many things that I've been taking pictures of but haven't had time to write about. Hopefully I'll find some time now that I'm relieved of school. Next time, look out for cannolis, monkey cakes, or filet mignon. I wouldn't recommend eating all of those in one sitting.

Food Porn

A friend sent me a link to Food Porn Daily, and I knew it was necessary to share with the world. I was a little hesitant to click on the link at first, but I promise it's something that you could flip through with your 80 year old grandmother without feeling awkward. That is, unless close-ups of food get you sexually aroused.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with food porn, here's a definition pulled from Wikipedia.

Food porn is a sarcastic term variously applied to a spectacular visual presentation of cooking or eating in advertisements, infomercials, cooking shows or other visual media, foods boasting a high fat and calorie content[1], exotic dishes that arouse a desire to eat[2] or the glorification of food as a substitute for sex

Deep Dish Pizza in Chi-Town

I went to Chicago 2 weeks ago with a student organization. Despite the unpleasant 15 degree weather, the city was beautiful and the architecture was breathtaking. I could imagine myself living there one day, especially if global warming took effect.

I knew I was going on this trip for about 6 months, so I had plenty of time to plan what kind of food I wanted to try while I was there. While watching Bobby Flay Throwdown last semester, Flay competed against Marc Malnati, owner of Lou Malnati's, a local deep dish pizza restaurant chain. I trust Food Network more than I probably should sometimes, and I figured if Malnati's pizza is good enough for a Throwdown, it's good to be thrown down into the pits of my blissful belly. So I told my friends that was one stop we had to make while we were there.

We had a group of 23 students, so we figured we should go ahead and make a reservation. Boy, were we lucky that we did. We walked into the restaurant, which was much smaller than I anticipated, and there was a pretty decent line of people waiting to be seated. I'd say we took up a good 1/3 of the occupancy with our party alone. The selection of deep dish pizzas didn't seem that large, but I guess it's a sign that they really specialize and perfect what they do have. We got a Malnati salad, one thin-crust cheese pizza, one large "Lou", and one large "Deluxe" pizza for one table of 11.

The salad was so delicious. The dressing was very sweet, yet tart, adding the perfect taste to the greens. Also, it was topped with crumbled gorgonzola cheese and fried salami bits. If you think you like bacon bits, wait until you try fried salami pieces. If they sold that in grocery stores, salami would steal all the bacon lovers.

It took a while for the deep-dish pizzas to come out, and I'm thinking it's because they take longer to cook than a regular thin-crust. Whatever the reason, the wait wasn't bad considering how amazing these pizzas tasted. I had the "Lou", which was the vegetarian stuffed pizza.  I had deep-dish pizza once before, but Lou's was so much better.  Just visually speaking, Lou's beats the other deep-dish I had in Orlando a couple years back.   Your eyes eat before your mouth does, and let's just say that Lou's made my mouth water, and the other made my eyes water.

Although it had no meat, this was a VERY filling slice of pie.  Stuffed with mounds of cheese, spinach, and mushrooms, and topped with tomatoes and (surprise) 3 more cheeses, I could feel a heart attack coming.  But it wasn't the cheese that took me overboard to near-cardiac arrest; it was the flaky buttercrust.  For only $1 more per pizza, you had the option to have buttercrust instead of their regular crust, and goodness gracious was I glad we decided to have that instead. The crust literally crumbled the minute it entered your mouth.  I would have eaten a plate of just crust if they offered that on the menu.  It's a shame that wasn't an option. But upon reflection, it's probably illegal to serve clogged arteries on a plate in Chicago. Different story in the south.

I had a bite of my friend's "Deluxe" pizza, which had cheese, mushrooms, sausage, onions, and green peppers, but I think the "Lou" was much better in taste.  The thin-crust was good, but I honestly think that Austin has some pretty good if not better thin-crust.  I would say that Malnati's specializes in their deep-dish and that would be my recommendation if you decide to make it out there.  But if Chi-town is too dreadfully cold for a visit, they ship their pizzas all across America.  It is a bit pricey, but if you're really looking to splurge, this might be a good option.  

While talking with locals there, I heard a lot of comments about Chicago hot dogs. The next time I go back in April, I will have to make a stop at a dog stand. That report will come later. Until then, happy eating :)