December 02, 2007
Misadventures in Cooking, part V: Was it such a misadventure?
It's been ages since I wrote here... but I just felt the urge to log in and write something this evening. Originally, it was going to be some pathetic whining about stupid errands that I tried to run today to no great success. Nothing important, just enough to make me frustrated...
But that would be boring to read about (I know, because it was boring to try to write), so I decided to write about cooking instead.
I have done quite a lot of cooking since the last entry. I've decided, actually, that it is tremendous fun -- when it isn't maddening or stressful. Maddening mostly comes from doing it wrong, stressful from trying to do too many new things at once and struggling to keep it all going at once.
It's about 100 times more fun to cook for other people than to cook for just me. Thus, I typically try out new recipes for things like family gatherings and holidays. The first holiday that I brought something to was Thanksgiving last year (about a month after episode IV in this series). I whipped up the Hawaiian-style sweet potatoes again... because I really like them (butter, brown sugar... what's not to like!), and sweet-potatoes are a rather Thanksgivingy dish.
Well, everybody loved them. They were a huge, huge success. Only half got eaten -- but considering that mine was one of 4 different sweet potato dishes at the event... that's understandable. But everybody tried them, and everybody liked. Yay! Go me!
For the next gathering, I decided to do dessert. I went the simple route: chocolate-dipped fruit. I went to one of the better chocolatiers in the area (specifically Chuao, in case you were curious), and bought some spicy dark chocolate and some sweet dark chocolate. I also grabbed some milk & white chocolate from Trader Joes -- and then got strawberries, blackberries, and blueberries from the local farmer's market.
Mix them together, and you have... well, you have me officially appointed as bringer-of-desserts for all future family gatherings, actually. Which is cool, because it's really easy to dip fruit in melted chocolate (except that white chocolate doesn't work so well)
Fast forward to this Thanksgiving. I'm still dessert-bringer -- and so far, I've always done something involving chocolate, and it's always been a big hit. So, I'm thinking... chocolate!
I recall an interesting looking recipe that Dan sent to me once -- a recipe for Chocolate Guinness Cake -- that is, a chocolate cake made with Guinness beer. I've never baked a cake before... but that sounds awfully yummy, so I give it a go.
If you've never made a cake, you might not appreciate how unhealthy they are. The recipe called for 4 cups of sugar and 4 sticks of butter (among other things). Now... 4 cups of sugar may not sound like that much -- it didn't sound too bad to me. But, when I was measuring it... I used a cereal bowl to hold it. And, when I'd scooped in 4 cups, the bowl was completely full, with a huge mound over the top. You probably know about what 4 sticks of butter looks like (it's an entire box -- 1 pound). Anyway, that's quite a bit.
The recipe was really pretty simple.
Put butter and beer in a pan, simmer. Add cocoa powder, whisk until mixed well.
put flour, sugar, baking soda in big bowl, mix
put eggs and sour cream in big bowl, mix.
pour beer/cocoa/butter mix into egg/sour cream. mix well.
mix in flour/sugar/baking soda into everything-else bowl.
take cake pans, line with butter, then add parchment paper. then grease paper with yet more butter.
pour batter in, bake.
take 1 pound of bittersweet chocolate, and chop it very fine.
pour cream into pan, simmer, add chopped chocolate, mix well, refrigerate, stir frequently, when it's the consistency of icing, it's done.
take cake layers out of oven. when they are completely cool, ice and stack. slice and eat!
(the whole recipe is here )
Anyway, it turned out really fabulous. There were a few moments of amusing tension along the way, such as when I realized that I had no plates large enough to put the cake on for stacking and icing. I ended up going with a pizza-pan, because Target had run out of cake plates, but they had pizza-pans left. This was interesting, because the pizza pan has holes in it. so i lined it with waxpaper, which worked fine, except that the pan was nonstick, and waxpaper on nonstick is very nonstick, and so while driving to dinner it almost ended up all over the car several times.
There were 24 people at the dinner, and most of them had a slice... and that was only half the cake. I was cutting slices as thing as humanly possible, which was fine, because the cake was really rich. (Not overly chocolatey, just really heavy).
Which turns out to be a good thing, since I later found out that the cake has about 14,000 calories in it, and that the tiny slices I was cutting were about 400 calories a pop, which is fine, and that a normal-sized slice would have been about 1200 calories, which is obscene.
Next time I'm going to break with the chocolate tradition, though, because I found a recipe for a peanut butter cake that looks fantastic, and I haven't had a peanut butter cake in about 18 years. That recipe looks more complicated, though... so... we'll see how it goes.
Posted by andrew at 12:13 AM | Comments (0)