Chocolate cake... mmmmmm.......

We've had a couple of birthdays around here.  Our eldest turned 3, Jaimie's birthday was today (though we had a party on Sunday) and our youngest will be turning 1.  For our 3-year-old's birthday, I made this deliciously moist chocolate cake.  I'm pretty sure that it was one of the best tasting cakes I've ever eaten.  I asked our birthday girl what she wanted for her birthday.  She said she wanted a cake.  I asked if she wanted anything else.  She wanted a present, and I asked what kind of present, and she said "a cake."  What kind of cake?  A castle cake (how convenient that we have a cast iron castle cake pan).  What flavor?  Chicken.  Well, chicken flavored cake is not that appealing to me as a baker, or a cake eater.  So we talked her into chocolate cake.  She was very satisfied with the end results, though she naturally had to grab at it before we frosted and decorated it.  You can see the finger line down the front. 

For the birthday party on Sunday, my MIL did the honors of making the birthday cake.  It was actually made with homemade brownie mix.  The Texas sheet cake recipe follows the brownie mix recipe.  I've gotta tell you, it was a hit with everyone.  I was jokingly telling my MIL that she was going to have to make a new one because I really wanted to eat the one she made before any of the guests came.

Pumpkin recipes - clearing out the freezer

I know that it's not the season, but after spending only $25 a week in groceries for 13 weeks, and refusing to buy a lot of foods when I know I'll be getting some from my own garden soon, we have a plethora of pumpkin left in the freezer (and rhubarb, and zucchini).

A few weeks ago I saw one of my FB friends post a recipe for a pumpkin and cream cheese roll.  I couldn't find it again but I found this recipe.  With much pumpkin left even with just the one quart bag we thawed, I found this site and followed a link to this delicious looking recipe for pumpkin rotini.  I think our toddler will be helping me make this, but we'll be making the pumpkin rotini with butter rather than margarine, and chives instead of shallots.  I'm looking forward to trying out some new recipes.

Using up the rhubarb

Since our rhubarb is already growing, we've got to use up some of the rhubarb we have frozen.  And we have a lot frozen.  I came across this recipe and just adapted it to whatever fruit I had available.  If the recipe was for rhubarb or peach, why not rhubarb and peach?

 The recipe is easy enough and doesn't have that many ingredients.  It's basically brown sugar, oatmeal, butter, flour, & salt for the top & bottom.

The filling is your fruit, sugar, flour & nutmeg (yum).  It takes a whole 5 minutes to assemble and only 30 minutes to bake.

On our second crisp, we went with ground cherries, black raspberries & rhubarb.

The only problem is that the finished product does not seem to last.

We ate this entire thing in less than 24 hours

We've still got two gallons of rhubarb left, so when we're done eating our second crisp, we'll try out some recipes on this site, which has all the rhubarb recipes you'd ever want.

Sweet things with ricotta

When making mozzarella from whole milk, you end up with whey that you just don't want to waste, so you end up making ricotta.  The last two times, we made a pasta bake and then a lasagna with the ricotta.  For today's batch of fresh ricotta, I wanted to do something different.  Considering that we're nearing Valentine's Day (a holiday we don't generally celebrate but I end up craving chocolate), I remembered that you can make a chocolate mousse with ricotta as well.  After researching a few recipes, I thought we'd make it like so:

Take the ricotta from your leftover whey (maybe about 15 ounces like a store-bought size), add about 1/3 cup of melted semi-sweet chocolate (or 4-5 oz baker's chocolate and 1/3 cup sugar), add about 1/2 cup cream, stir & serve. Add some garnishments, like whipped cream or our awesome molasses cookies (in moose form).

There were so many recipes out there, and I wasn't going to do something where I would have to run to the store, especially since we have hit our $25 for the week.   Other recipes called for raw eggs and I didn't want to do that.  Several called for maple syrup, honey, or sugar, generally when using unsweetened cocoa.  Many called for fat-free this or low-fat that, but low-fat foods are just disgusting and unhealthy, so we won't have any of that in our house.

I may have considered using powdered unsweetened cocoa, but I used that all up when making a batch of chocolate ice cream this morning. 

Because we'll be making plenty of cheese in the future and we'll have a lot of ricotta to eat, I thought that I'd research for a few more ricotta desserts.  I haven't tried them out, but here are some to choose from, from various other ricotta-loving bloggers and bakers out there.

Coffee and chocolate mousse, using just ricotta, dark chocolate, honey & instant coffee.
Orange ricotta mousse with orange caramel, which just sounds and looks decadent.
Ricotta fluff, with amaretto and rum.
Hindu Cheese Dessert, with cottage cheese and cardamom.
Ricotta Vanilla Cream, with just a few ingredients.
Warm honey and cinnamon over ricotta, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Balsamic Strawberries with ricotta, with basil garnish.

Or, you could put ricotta in crepes with berries for either dessert or breakfast.

Banana cream pie

There's this place not too far away that has great banana cream pie.  I'm not sure if it's made with Real food, but it sure is good.  I kept thinking about that pie, and thinking about it, and thinking about it.  So, we decided to make one.  It took awhile because twice the family ate the bananas that I was planning on using for the pie.  I also wanted a graham cracker crust, but didn't want to buy graham crackers because the ones I found all had high fructose corn syrup.  So, first we started with making graham crackers, to crush up for the crust.  I crushed it, added about a tablespoon of sugar and half a stick of butter, then smushed it into the bottom of a pie pan.  Then it was time the bananas and cream.  I found a recipe that looked and sounded good, and it sure did deliver.

Start with graham cracker crust

Line with banana slices

Add the cream/pudding mix on top

Having been raised in a family that did NOT focus on Real food, just as most of us, I thought that pudding came in powdered form from a box.  I did know that it was made with milk though.   After lining the top of the crust with banana slices, I made the cream pudding portion.  I didn't realize that the milk, sugar, flour, egg yolks and salt would thicken up like it did.  I was pretty impressed with myself.  Just toss in the rest of the ingredients, and pour over the bananas.  We were thinking of making just a simple whipped topping but we had three egg whites left, so we made a meringue topping with cream of tartar, sugar and vanilla.  While it looked pretty, we weren't able to get others to taste test it, because we just kept eating it.  I guess we'll have to make another one soon.

Keep the egg whites if you want to make meringue

Put on top of the pie

Bake till browned

Snow cream

Our daughter likes to eat snow.  We try to stop her from eating the snow off of her shoes, or along the driveway, so we generally take her out in the backyard in an area where the neighbor's dog hasn't run all over.  When we had snow a few weeks ago, she was all for the idea of taking snow into the house and making it into a dessert.

All you've got to do is take about one gallon of (undisturbed) snow.  Put it in a 5 quart bucket (from ice cream previously bought - at least that would be easiest).   We put about 1- 1 1/2 cups milk, with a dash of vanilla, about 1/2 to 1/3 cup sugar.  Just whip it all in the snow and eat.  Keep the leftovers in the freezer and you can be eating snow when it is unseasonably warm as it has been.

National Pie Day

Monday, January 23rd is National Pie Day.  A bunch of friends are going to celebrate by making their mouths happy.  We celebrated a day early with a cherry raspberry pie.  We had some pie filling from a local source, with only real ingredients, so I cheated a bit.  It's been a long-ish day so I won't feel guilty about it.  I added a crumble topping with just flour, brown sugar and butter.  Everyone enjoyed it and we have enough left over for celebrating the actual day tomorrow.

Nutella yumminess

Jaimie and I found a great deal on some delicious chocolate hazelnut spread so I went a-searching for some recipes to use it in.  Holy cats there are a lot of wonderful recipes out there.  We've previously used it in a bread roll from a Food & Wine magazine recipe, but there are a lot of creative ideas out there.  We even found out that there's a Nutella Day (February 5th), but why wait till then to write about all of our Nutella experiments.  See nutelladay.com

Since it was the holiday season, we decided to make some things we could hand out as gifts.  Part of our Nutella mini spree was chocolate hazelnut biscotti.  

It was pretty easy - just toast the hazelnuts, toss the ingredients together and bake twice.  You need to bake it once in two long strips, then let it cool, cut it and bake it again.  You could probably even do the first baking part in the morning or day before and then finish it off later.

We also made chocolate hazelnut fudge with a sprinkle of sea salt on top.  It was so good I had to make a second batch when my sister came over.  One blogger said that she was too afraid to try the sea salt and instead added sugar sprinkles.  I think the sea salt adds a lovely intensity when you get a bit of salt in that bite.  It's just really delicious.

Fudge in the makeshift double broiler

We added homemade caramels, home canned foods & a bottle of mead and that was what almost everyone got for their holiday gift this year.

With so much Nutella left, we made ice cream, loosely using a recipe we used before making peanut butter ice cream.  I just added a cup of Nutella to 1/2 cup sugar and blended, then added 2 cups milk, one cup cream, a pinch of salt, and put it in the ice cream maker.   Jaimie said that it was the best one we've made so far.

holiday baking

My older sister and I used to have an annual holiday baking party.  We'd have a lot of friends, a lot of ingredients, and a lot of fun.  We'd bake all day and then split it up at the end.  I really miss that.  This year, however, I was able to attend a cookie exchange.  Though there weren't a lot of people, there was variety.  I brought molasses cookies in a candy cane shape.  There were chocolate mint truffles, caramel filled thumbprints with nuts, butterscotch bars, and bacon chocolate chip cookies.

Baked goods are one of my favorite things about the holidays.  I don't think I'm done with the baking.  I have some ideas in my head and we'll see if they materialize.  Plus, I'll take pics.

Ice cream, sorbet and gadgetry

Last year for the holidays I received an ice cream maker.  To be quite honest, I wasn't sure that I'd use it very often and thought that it would just sit in the kitchen cabinet.  Then we decided to try it out because, well, we're trying to eat less extra "stuff," so if we made our own then we'd know what was in it.
The basic recipe for sorbet is sugar, water, a dash of salt and whatever fruit you want for flavor (we've got frozen pureed watermelon from our garden and I'm looking forward to having it in the middle of winter).  For ice cream, it's sugar, heavy cream, milk, dash of salt and whatever flavor you want.  We've been experimenting, of course, and don't want to just stick to the booklet that came with the machine.  We've tried the norms - strawberry, chocolate - but then we tried other flavors that you can't find too often at the store - green tea, peanut butter, mango, violet, and lavender (which Jaimie thinks tastes like soap).  I'm snacking on violet ice cream right now, and we just made peanut butter. We do love our ice cream at this house. (Our toddler loves her sorbet, because she is lactose intolerant, but she needs a treat too).

For being someone who hated being in the kitchen except for the annual holiday baking parties, I have changed drastically.  My go-to dinner used to be frozen pizza, because really, it doesn't get much easier.  I've had the fortune of living with different good cooks over the years, including my sister and my husband.  I admit that those years (and these years) I was spoiled.  I still didn't bother learning from them, but at least now I like to bake and create, though still not fond of cooking.
I am fond of kitchen appliances though.  For wanting to live simply, I like our kitchen gadgetry.  I inherited my sister's Kitchen Aid mixer, with attachments.  We have a bread maker, which we only use for mixing but not actual baking (it's been a full year now since we last regularly bought bread from the store).  We have a rice cooker, a slow cooker, an immersion blender, a quesadilla maker, a waffle iron, a food dehydrator, a NuWave oven, and more, and we use them all regularly.  I'd blame it on Jaimie, but I'm equally at fault for being an appliance hoarder.  Oooh shiny.  And people thought that giving appliances was not cool.  One of my husband's favorite gifts was the immersion blender. 

I'm loving our kitchen stuff, and the yummy food it all makes.