Thursday, March 22, 2018

Another Year, Another Chocolate Birthday Cake

Not that anyone is complaining, mind you!

I was going to make a Boston Cream Pie for my husband like last year, but then I saw this recipe for a Guinness cake with frosting that is flavored both with whiskey and Irish Cream. It looked like fun and I'm happy to report it IS fun to make!

Yesterday I made the cake part, which went smoothly. Each layer was wrapped and refrigerated until today. Once I made the frostings, I split the cake layers (my husband was very impressed with the evenness, thank you, culinary school!) and assembled the cake. I know the recipe says to serve immediately, but I have other things I have to do for dinner that are more time sensitive than this, so this can wait in the fridge until after dinner. I will sprinkle the top with cocoa before I serve it.

Sunday, March 18, 2018

Stuck In The House

Well, not really. But close enough. Our bunny has been ill and I needed to keep a close eye on him after I brought him back from the vet yesterday. So I'm not planning on going anywhere. The youngerchild and I are working on a gladiator helmet for Latin class and I made chicken stock and soup.

I'd roasted a chicken on Thursday and set aside the bones and leftover meat for this project. However, I also dug through the freezer and found a second bag of chicken bones and meat so added those in. After pouring off 9 pints of stock from the pot, I added more water and simmered again to make the soup. Now the soup is simmering with green beans, celery, carrots and onion. The stock has been canned and is cooling down.

While I was digging through the freezer I did find 5 gallons of tomatoes that I'd frozen last summer. Those were simmered until soft and passed through the food mill. I always forget what a mess that is, and today was no exception. My shirt was spattered with orange sauce, as if I were an extra in a low-budget horror movie. But the sauce is now simmering nicely and it remains to be seen how many pints of sauce I will get. [Edit: 7 pints. I left them plain, without any herbs or spices.]

In the meantime, I keep checking on the bunny and hoping that he's starting to eat. 

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Closer to Wonder

Since I got Legion, my yeast starter, I've mainly used it to make loaves of bread for toast and sandwiches. Until recently I generally used a combination of 1 part sprouted wheat flour and 3 parts bread flour with either honey or maple syrup as the sugar. However, the youngerchild expressed nostalgia for Wonder bread and requested I try to get the bread a little closer to that. The changes I made were: use all-purpose flour instead of the other flours and use sugar instead of honey or maple syrup. Everything else is the same. It's not super squishy like Wonder bread - honestly, I'm not sure how they do that, nor how they make the crust so soft - but it is white inside and less dense. We're all pretty happy with how it came out. After the first batch, we couldn't stop ourselves and just ate warm bread with butter and almost finished a whole loaf in 10 minutes! Tonight we'll probably do the same thing as these loaves just came out of the oven. Mmmm!

Nor'easter

Welcome to March, when we in New England are subjected to back to back nor'easters. What makes them worse is that it was so warm in February we got into spring mode already. Mother Nature is laughing at us.

Regardless, what is nice is having a day when I have no place to be, and I can just bake to my heart's content. Also nice is that tomorrow is Pi Day.

I'm still working on a batch of bread, but this is what I've baked so far:

Baked apples - This was breakfast, along with bagels and lox. The apples were stuffed with some of those maple candied black walnuts, cinnamon, brown sugar and butter, and then baked. The verdict? More sugar and cinnamon. (I'd put 1 tsp sugar and 1/8 tsp cinnamon in each apple.)

Apple Pie - playing around with the crust again, I made some roses and a partial lattice. The pie filling was made and canned last fall and this pie used 2 pints. This crust was all butter because I only made enough for 1 single-crust pie and dragging the leaf lard out of the freezer for 1/4 cup seemed like a lot of work.

There is also a blueberry tart made with the leftover crust. That'll be for snack today!

Saturday, March 3, 2018

Foraging Benefit

This morning we had waffles, which is exciting enough just by itself. However, I dressed them up with bananas and maple syrup that had been infused with black walnuts. These have been hiding in the fridge for a while, and they do seem to last forever! I guess maple syrup is a good preservative. Anyway, the walnuts are soaked in syrup and are very sweet but with that strong black walnut flavor. The syrup brings a more subtle amount of that black walnut flavor to the waffles. Perfect.
Now, what to do with those maple-infused black walnuts?