Lemon curd french toast with blueberry-raspberry syrup (Taken with instagram)

Remember like six months ago when I decided to delegate my cooking responsibilities to a professional? Yeah, I’m opting for that again. It became clear to me that my hatred of planning meals, buying food, and cleaning the kitchen was overwhelming my love of cooking when I purchased 2 pizzas, a package of hot dogs, and a bag of granola with chocolate in it during my shopping trip to Whole Foods.

Next week I get to eat vegan sausage and peppers, Mexican quinoa, steamed vegetables with tofu and peanut sauce, vegan “tuna” noodle casserole, and “vegan “franks” and beans and I hardly have to go grocery shopping. Jenny wins.

But I totally made a raspberry pie last night. If it turned out well (it’s setting in the ‘fridge right now) I’ll let you know.

Results of today’s Cajun and Creole cooking class: Chicken & andouille gumbo, pickled shrimp, blackened pork tenderloin, and sweet potato biscuits. More details to come…

Baking chocolate chip cookies via A-Ha’s “Take on Me” video. After this we were pursued by two men in racing gear who were wielding pipe wrenches. We escaped after a handsome Norwegian pop star helped us climb through a window and into a trashcan in a diner.

The Margarita.

1. Don’t screw around with cake recipes.Under no circumstances should you be perusing allrecipes.com, food.com, cooks.com, or similar, unless you want to make, say, Rice Krispie treats, microwave fudge, or green bean casserole. I will admit to liking all three of those things, but getting a precise recipe for any of them isn’t a major concern. Cakes are a different story. You want to be overloaded with information. You want to know everything. You need a lot more than a semi-accurate ingredient list and two badly written sentences of instructions. Once you get a good recipe, stick to it and don’t get distracted. Pay attention to details and don’t wing it.

2. Don’t try to get cute and make blueberry frosting to put in your new little pastry bag. Metal cake decorating tips were not designed to expel bits of blueberry skin. You will end up with an exploded pastry bag and no discernible ruffles or rosebuds on your cake.

3. Under no circumstances should you put Squirt (as in the grapefruit-flavored soda) into a cake batter. The cake will taste like black olives for reasons no one wants to explore further. In my defense, I was going insane at the time. It was the start of the school year, and I had just come back from my honeymoon. I was not in the right frame of mind for baking. I think I used Splenda, too. God help me.

4. Use baking spray (Pam for Baking is what I get) on cake pans. It works perfectly, it’s easy, and it even smells like vanilla cake batter.

5. Don’t overmix. If you undermix a cake batter, the worst result is a tender, light, delicate cake that can’t hold any frosting or keep its shape. Who cares. Better to have a crumbling cake that people actually want to eat than a gummy hunk of calorie-laden starch. People get pissed when they eat 600 calories of cake that has the texture of a microwaved Twinkie. On the other hand, crumble your structurally unsound cake, whipped cream, and some berries in martini glasses and you’ve just made individual trifles. People will assume you know about British shit like Trollope novels and kedgeree. You will be loved.

Stay tuned for my cake disaster. It started off with a good idea, and ended with my dog licking pinkish blueberry flavored cream cheese frosting off the floor.  

stepawayfromthenames:

There are two famous Jasons: the horror movie guy and the & the Argonauts guy.  They were both dicks.  Move on.

This candybar recipe will make you so happy that you’ll reconsider your decision to throw a molotov cocktail into a shop window (UK version) or quit your job and move to Canada to become a peyote enthusiast (US version). It will also make you chubby, diabetic, and sick to your stomach if you overindulge. I warned you…

(Loosely adapted from Nigella Lawson’s Sweet and Salty Crunch Nut Bars from Nigella Kitchen)

1. Get out a rectangular Pyrex dish, sheet cake pan, or quarter sheet pan and a ton of waxed paper. Get out a medium to large sauce pan with a heavy bottom.

2. Measure out the equivalent of 1.5 egg whites from a carton of that Break Free liquid egg whites stuff they sell next to the real eggs. It’s pasteurized & you don’t have to futz with the separating of the whites from the yolks. Put the whites in the bowl of your stand mixer with the whisk attachment, if you have one, or a big metal bowl if you don’t—get out your hand mixer.

3. Pour 1 cup of corn syrup & a teaspoon of vanilla extract into the egg white goo. Mix this on high for about 1-2 minutes, then slow the mixer down (or turn off your hand mixer and stretch your fingers) and add 1 cup of powdered sugar. Mix this on high again for another 2 to 4 minutes, or until it’s very thick. Add a healthy blob (from 1/4 to 3/4 cup) of room temperature creamy peanut butter and mix for another 2-3 minutes. Now you have peanut butter marshmallow fluff goop. Mmmmm.

4. Take about 11 ounces of bar chocolate (I used 2 Cadbury Dairy Milks and 1 Green & Black’s 70% dark chocolate bar) or a bag of good chocolate chips. Melt the chocolate gently over low heat in the sauce pan along with a stick of unsalted butter & 3 tablespoons of corn syrup. (Start dialing the ambulance.)

5. Once the chocolate is melted you can stir in a cup or 2 of crunchy things like salted peanuts or kettle potato chips (Rick’s suggestion) or Captain Crunch or pretzel bits. Mix things around throughly, and take the pan off the heat.

6. Pour half of the chocolate mixture into your pan that you’ve lined aggressively with waxed paper. Put the rest of the chocolate off to the side and cover it so no one sticks his/her greedy fingers into it. Let the mixture in the pan cool on the counter for 10 minutes, then stick it (covered loosely with foil) in the freezer for 20 minutes.

7. Take out the frozen chocolate slab and pour some of that peanut butter marshmallow fluff you made over it. Spread it around with a spatula so it’s even. Go for a relatively thin layer. Now cover this loosely with foil again and put it back in the freezer for 20 more minutes.

8. Take out your chocolate-marshmallow slab and pour the remaining chocolate mixture evenly over the top. Sprinkle the top with a dash of coarse sea salt, unless you’ve used very very salty peanuts or chips or pretzels. Put this caloric nightmare back into the freezer for 30 minutes.

9. Cut the chocolate into bars and eat one of these magnificent things with a glint of hope for the future of the human race in your eyes. Take the rest of the bars to work and strut around with a smug look on your face. For god’s sake don’t leave them in your freezer. Your pancreas is pleading for sanity.

Ugly Bundt.

I have a silicone bundt pan, which makes excellent chocolate bundts and monkey bread-like concoctions, but it browns unevenly and it’s impossible to get the baked-on sugar crud off of it.

That didn’t stop me from making a non-chocolate bundt. I wanted to make something with the local blackberries we bought. I love blackberries, but they go moldy in about 8 hours, and they’re not cheap.

I made Bill Yosses and Melissa Clark’s recipe for blackberry buttermilk bundt cake  featured on tastingtable.com with a few adaptations. I substituted half a pound of the blackberries with the equivalent of 3 peeled and diced nectarines.

I sprinkled a few teaspoons of sugar over the berries and nectarine bits and set the whole mess in a colander over a bowl. I used the leftover juices plus about a cup of leftover nectarine bits and blackberries to make a sauce to serve with the finished cake. I simmered the fruit, juices, and a few more teaspoons of sugar over low heat while the cake was baking, then as as the cake cooled I turned off the heat, added a tablespoon of cornstarch, stirred for a couple of minutes, then pressed the mixture through a mesh filter to get out the seeds. I let it sit for about ten more minutes, then we ate cake. 

My cake was pretty ugly thanks to my crappy bundt pan, but it tastes great. It’s like a cross between a pound cake, a coffee cake, and a great muffin. It does absolutely have to bake for the full hour indicated in the recipe, possibly longer. The batter is super thick. The exposed top of the bundt gets brown and chewy/crispy from the sugar, the cake stays moist and super-rich.