Easier Than Falling Off a Log
Archive for August, 2008
August 26, 2008 at 12:39 pm · Filed under dessert, food
This past weekend we had another barbeque to go to, so of course it was time to make something. Which meant that I got to take pictures in our newly-brightly-lit kitchen, so not using the flash was finally a possibility that DIDN’T necessarily mean everything would be blurry. See?
Anyway. I made them the night before, at which time they were fantastic, all warm and soft inside and crisp outside. They were less crisp the next day at the barbeque, which didn’t seem to bother anyone else but me, although I can’t help but think everyone would have been more impressed if they’d been the right texture. Not that nearly anyone there had had churros before, though, so maybe they wouldn’t know what the right texture was supposed to be. I don’t know. I second-guess myself too much. People were happy. What more should I want?
I got to use my wok for deep-frying, though, which was pretty cool, I have to say. Arteries be damned (or dammed, ha ha ha), it makes me want to deep-fry more often. Particularly dough type things, to watch them go from raw dough to puffed up, golden brown deliciousness.
Also, whence I got this recipe originally, there was some disagreement in the comments over whether the addition of eggs was traditionally Spanish. People seem to think that this is a more South American style of churro, so I’m going to go with that. I would not know; I am not a churro expert. I have, however, converted some metric measurements to American, and if you read the comments on the original post, you’ll see me all confused, wondering how much sugar to add to the recipe. Since I couldn’t very well sit around and wait for word, I used the amount one of the other commenters said… which turned out to be twice the amount that was supposed to be listed in this recipe. Oops and everything, but it turned out delicious so who cares.
Churros
Ingredients
a bit more than 1 cup water
6 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 3/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
cinnamon and sugar mixed together, for coating – I just eyeballed it and you can too!
Method
Mix together the flour and the baking powder; set aside.
Put the water, butter, sugar, and salt in a pot and bring to a boil.
Turn off the heat and dump all the flour in at once (I like non-fussy recipes like this. None of this “add a third of the flour, add some other thing, add another third of the flour, compose a sonnet, now add the rest… standing on one foot” baloney), and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon until it forms a ball.
Set the dough aside to cool, then transfer to a stand mixer. I don’t think I let mine cool enough first, since when I was mixing it started to steam… but whatever. That’s proof that you can be a little rushed about the whole cooling thing and still have it turn out well.
Add the eggs, one at a time, beating on medium speed until fully combined.
If you have a pastry bag, put the dough in it. If you don’t, do like me and cut the corner off a ziploc bag – since the pastry bag was supposed to use a star-shaped tip, I tried to cut a star shape in the corner of the ziploc bag. That wasn’t as successful. They basically just came out as tubes.
Heat up a bunch of oil in whatever you plan to use for deep-frying – my electric wok worked wonderfully for this. You want to heat the oil on a high heat, put the dough in, and then reduce the heat to medium-high, although if you can’t get all the churros in at once, this will really only be relevant to your first batch.
Anyway, squeeze the dough out of your bag into the hot oil in 4-5″ lengths, and fry them until they are golden brown and puffy. I turned mine a bit so they’d be sure to cook evenly, since they tend to float up to the top.
Let them drain on a paper towel for a bit.
Then, while they’re still warm, roll them around in the cinnamon sugar.
Serve while they’re fresh and hot, they’re best that way, and if, like me, you happen to have caramel glaze or chocolate ganache left over from other baking projects, feel free to use them for dipping sauces. Which I don’t have a picture of, so here’s another of them sitting on a plate all sugared up!
August 20, 2008 at 2:53 pm · Filed under meta
I haven’t posted anything in donkey’s years, I KNOW, and it’s because my weekends have been chockablock with roller derby-related stuff (open skates to participate in, bouts and scrimmages to go to), and the North End festival season is in full swing so we go there and eat ourselves silly and then don’t feel like making food. And then because of all these other demands on my time, I miss days at the gym and have to make them up all in a row – this week, Monday through Wednesday it’s the gym, tomorrow night there’s an open skate in some godforsaken suburb and I won’t get back until after midnight, and Friday we’ll probably have to go to UPS in another godforsaken suburb and won’t have time to do anything up, really. If my dad’s new camera he’s having shipped to us doesn’t arrive by Friday, there’s hope. The weekend, well, one of the days we’ll be in the North End, and the other one we’ve got a friend’s barbeque, but maybe I’ll be able to make something to bring to that.
The worst part about this is that we just replaced the kitchen lightbulb (with one that gives “natural” light, no less), and I think it might make a real difference in any photos I might take, so I’m jumping up and down to make something so I can test it out.
Anyway, I thought I ought to say SOMETHING, since I’ve signed up for a blogging event, and I don’t want whoever my mentor winds up being to think this is some kind of defunct blog that foundered a scant two months after its inception. I post! I swear! Sometimes I post AND swear at the same time! Just not in the past couple of weeks. Well, ok, I’ve just been swearing.
August 11, 2008 at 4:50 pm · Filed under dessert, food
For Matt’s birthday on Saturday, I baked him a cake, and he decided on the Guinness Chocolate Cake recipe I had from somewhere. But when we were in Ireland (for all of 3 days), he discovered Murphys, which is a stout from Cork. It’s the same idea as Guinness (well, obviously, they’re both stouts), but it’s a bit creamier and has a slightly different flavour. Anyway, he prefers it, so while I was shopping for ingredients, I made sure to get that instead.
I was curious as to how this would turn out. Would it taste weird? Also, the cake has a sauce component – you bake the cake, then you take it out of the pan, poke holes in it, and pour this sauce over it. And then you cover the whole thing in ganache, so the sauce isn’t an icing or anything. I’m sure this is a totally common feature of cakes, but it isn’t one I’d encountered, so I was very interested to see it in action.
And dude. It worked! It didn’t taste like just beer, it’s very chocolatey, and the sauce gives it little pockets of more intense flavour in each slice. The ganache kind of failed in that it was too runny and I had to let it sit overnight in the fridge to get any use out of it, but it tasted fine. I just didn’t get that classic smooth ganache finish.
Oh, and also the cake stuck to the pan and kind of broke in half when I was taking it out. I tried to cover it up, but I guess it’s a good thing Matt’s not the sort of person to get all fussy about the perfect appearance of his food, because this one certainly didn’t possess one.
Guinness Murphys Chocolate Cake
Edit: ooh, awesome, I found out where I got it from! It’s from The Recipe Girl… and we took very similar pictures of the thing, although of course hers is better.
Ingredients
for the cake
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/3 cup stout (use Guinness, or some other stout, if you want… but seriously, Murphys IS better, and a creamier beer is a better cake ingredient, don’t you think? I highly recommend using it if you can get it in your area)
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt (if you have such a measuring device… otherwise, approximate, like I did – it turned out fine)
1/3 cup butter, softened (you may have an easier time of creaming it than I did if you remember to actually SOFTEN it… derrrr)
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs (the original recipe specified large eggs, but who has the luxury of choosing the size of their eggs? Maybe if you have your own chickens…)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/3 cup buttermilk
for the sauce
1/4 cup stout – please note, this is the last amount of beer you’ll need for the actual recipe. Feel free to commence drinking the rest.
4 tbsp brown sugar
2 Tbs unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 tsp vanilla
for the ganache
10 oz (1 1/4 cups) heavy whipping cream
10 ounces semi-sweet chocolate chips
** note: this makes more than enough ganache, even if you have a heavy hand with the stuff or – ahem – need to cover up cake ruptures. This is not necessarily a problem if you don’t mind fattening yourself up by drizzling it over ice cream… or any other good use you can think of putting it to. But if you just want enough for the cake itself, you can get by with 3/4 of that amount, for sure – maybe even a generous half.
Method
for the cake
Now, listen. I’m going to write what I actually did; this is different on several occasions from the original recipe. The whole time I was apologizing to Matt for potentially screwing up his birthday cake. But you know what? It turned out just fine, and other than having a structural problem getting it out of the pan, it looks basically the same as The Recipe Girl’s photos. Just messier. So you can do it this way, or you can do it that way, and either way you’ll get delicious cake. And even if you don’t, you’ve got the rest of the beer to console you.
Preheat oven to 350 F.
Grease and lightly flour a 9″ cake pan. She used an 8″ pan for a taller cake, and mine WAS quite low, but I didn’t have an 8″ pan so too bad for me.
In a small pot, combine cocoa powder and stout over low to medium heat, giving it the occasional stir, until smooth.
Remove from the heat and set aside.
In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
Using a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter.
Add the sugar, in increments, and beat until pale yellow.
Beat in each egg, one at a time.
Beat in the vanilla.
Beat in the buttermilk. Here is the first place in which it diverges from the original recipe – she added the buttermilk to the stout/cocoa mixture first, and then mixed that whole thing in. Whoops. Except not.
Add the stout/cocoa mixture into the batter, gradually. The original recipe had this being alternated with the flour – again, whoops.
Add the flour, gradually. The original recipe said that the batter would appear to be breaking up and look grainy at this point; mine did not, due, no doubt, to my “errors” in the order of adding things. Don’t stress yourself out over it. If it looks grainy, you’re doing it right according to her; if it doesn’t look grainy, neither did mine and it worked ok.
Pour batter into your cake pan and bake for 25-35 minutes, or until a toothpick in the centre comes out clean. This was the case for me at 25 minutes.
Cool in the pan, on a wire rack with waxed paper underneath, for 10 minutes, then endeavour to get the cake out of the pan without disasters.
Once the cake is upside-down on the rack, poke a bunch of holes in it with a fork (if it doesn’t already have a bunch of gaping wounds from emergency cake surgery getting it out of the pan).
for the sauce
Mix all the sauce ingredients together in a pot over low heat, until smooth, then allow to cool.
Spoon about 3/4 of the sauce over the bottom of the cake, letting it seep in through the holes.
Now turn your cake right-side-up, poke a bunch more holes, and pour the rest of the sauce over them.
for the ganache
Bring the cream to a simmer in a small pot.
Remove from the heat and stir in chocolate until smooth. You may have to let it sit for a while or even put it in the fridge before the consistency thickens up enough to not get absorbed by the cake.
Once the desired consistency has been acheived, pour it over the cake and spread it along the sides.
If you want, you can put the excess ganache in a ziploc bag and cut the corner off and get all fancy on the decorating. Or you can just keep it for other things that need rich chocolate poured all over them (which is most things, let’s be honest).
August 5, 2008 at 12:57 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta, side dishes/appetizers
Oh, orzo, you think you are rice, but you are pasta. You poor, deluded sap. You taste good, though. Particularly in this recipe, which I got from Coffee and Vanilla and got to make last night, because Matt was at a union meeting. See, it’s off my “only me” recipe list; he’s not a particular fan of tomatoes, and he may have balked at the cream cheese (even though there’s not very much of it). But it’s ridiculously delicious. I was full, but I kept sneaking another fork of it.
I got to support local farmers with this dish, though – I had jury duty yesterday, but they wound up not needing me, and all the superfluous jurors got let out around 1pm. When I came out, there was a farmers’ market set up along the edge of Government Center. So I picked up my tomatoes and an enormous bunch of dill – way more than I’ll ever need, but they weren’t selling it in smaller increments, which is always a problem I have with produce around here – and went on my merry little way.
This differs from the original recipe in two ways. First, the original was for appetizers or side dishes, but for 4 – 6 people, so I halved it in order to make a meal-sized amount for just me. But it was still too much. I have a big ol’ tupperware of it in the fridge. And that’s how I know that it’s good cold as well as warm – it could serve as a pasta salad. The second thing is my own stupid fault: the original recipe gives the amount of pasta in grams, but I have no measuring implements that give grams. I thought, oh, I’ll just look on my measuring cup, it’s got metric on the other side, happy slappy. But I neglected to pay attention to the (obvious) fact that the measuring cup’s metric measurements were in mL, not grams, and that the two are not the same unless you’re talking about water. But gauging by the proportion of the box that I used, I don’t think I was terribly far off. I’m going to skip telling people how much orzo to use in my version of the recipe, though – why duplicate mistakes?
Tomato-Dill Orzo
Ingredients
enough orzo to feed however many people you want – I used about half a small box
2 1/2 tbsp cream cheese
1 1/2 tbsp fresh dill (or, you know, a little more won’t kill you)
2 tomatoes
salt
pepper
Method
Cook the orzo according to package directions; this should be about 10 minutes.
Meanwhile, slice the tomatoes into wedges, arrange on a baking sheet, and put them in the oven – the original recipe specified using the “grill” option, which my oven does not have, so I used the toaster oven and just set it on “toast” (which is also not a temperature, but it means both the top and the bottom heaters are on). The idea is to cook them until they are soft, also about 10 minutes, so they are done at the same time as the pasta.
While that’s all going, chuck everything else into a bowl.
Once the pasta is done, drain it and add it to the bowl, mixing well to coat the orzo with the cream cheese and dill, and then throw the tomatoes in, give it another stir, and eat!
