A little of this, a little of that

I'm here today with a meandering post of pictures taken with my phone.



Here we have Oscar. He is an at-least-6-year-old dachshund (we got him from a shelter and couldn't be sure of his age then and people are always saying he looks older, so maybe he is). Here is Oscar's morning routine:

-Get out of little dog bed beside people bed
-Follow Kimberly to see if food will be immediately served.
-Sit and stare at Kimberly to see if this will induce her to immediately serve food
-Give up; find the softest possible place on the couch
-Move only when food is served

When he's really full of himself he likes to make a small complaining "uhhhhh" sound just under his breath if you disturb him when he is in such a state. Like, if you ever so softly stroke his silken ears...he goes "uhhhhhhh...uhhhhhhh...." with each breath to make it clear that you are surely causing him mental and emotional, if not actual physical, pain. He is spoiled, and its a mystery to me how he got that way.

I love me some Oscar.

We saw this product in a store that was going out of business. Anything look strange to you?

How about the 4-year-old with the mustache? Maybe he's in some sort of a costume, but that isn't readily apparant to me, so I rate this picture "Weird".

My favorite colors as a little girl were pink and purple. Can you imagine the hyperventilating had I seen this car way back when? (On the right just behind The Pink and Purple Wonder you can see the front quarter panel of my beloved light blue Blazer. Aren't you glad I told you?)

This was enjoyed by Walt and me this past Saturday at the delectable Grits and Groceries. This is:

.

Miss Linda's Scallops: Pan Seared in a Lemon Caper Sauce with Cheese Grits, Mushrooms and Chopped Bacon.

.

Yes, all those words need to be capitalized in order to convey the delicious-ness of Miss Linda's Scallops. They were preceded by Hattie Mae's Tomato Pie and followed by a slice of chocolate chess pie. Can I please go back next Saturday and every Saturday after that??

Stick Figure Family

Haaaaa! I just found a link on Tracey's blog to this website where you can order those family stickers for your car. I couldn't resist mocking up this sticker for us. This sticker would cost me $47.25...I gotta lose a couple random animals or something.

.

Please note! Hubs wears a helmet when riding his motorcycle...the site only offered a head with a football helmet or a hockey helmet...and then you would have laughed and mocked him for wearing the wrong kind of helmet. Don't say you wouldn't.

TWD: Pumpkin muffins

Note: You only have until October 31 to join the baking odyssey! Buy the book, go sign up and show us your food!

I was coming off a TWD slump and needed something to get me back in the swing...enter: Pumpkin Muffins. Simple, quick, yummy. Thank you, Dorie!

Things started pretty normally, but then the batter got weirdly grainy once the eggs were added in.

But once the dry ingredients/raisins (I used dark raisins, by the way)/walnuts were added in things got back to normal.

And turned into these!

My only teensy weensy complaint would be that they seemed a tad dry even though I checked them a couple minutes before the lowest cooking time Dorie listed. My oven must run hot or something...I'll just have to check sooner in the future.

Dorie knows what she's talking about (imagine that) when she says to split, toast and add marmalade...very niiiice.

Go make these muffins! They're like little chunks of fall!

Just cuz, take a look at that turtle with her legs stretched out...have you ever seen such?

TWD: Caramel Peanut-Topped Brownie Cake

Caramel, peanuts, cakes that are brownie-like: heaven!! My experience with it all: not heaven :( I had such high hopes for this cake. The picture in the book was gorgeous, and I couldn't wait for that first piece.

It was all so promising in the beginning what with the buttered and floured pan...

And the sugar and eggs...

And look how creamy and luscious it is with all those dry bits mixed in. Wait...crap! I mixed it out of order!! Forgot to mix in the chocolate first! This means that the dry ingredients will be mixed too much! Shoot!!!

It sure is pretty though. Ah, well we'll hope for the best.

In the meantime let's tackle this caramel business. 5 minutes came and went...10 minutes came and went...15 minutes came and went...and then 15 minutes 30 seconds came, and I happened to sit down for approximately 10 seconds to eat a sandwich for goodness sakes and suddenly the caramel was all, "Oh, well you've missed your chance my friend. I am now officially much too amber".

I was worried...but I decided to go ahead with it just in case the combo of the pretty but mixed out of order cake and the possibly burnt caramel would turn into magic.

Ooo-whee! That's a pretty cake! My cake did sink in the middle as it cooled, but Dorie warned us of that, so I was not alarmed.

Upon tasting I was a tad disappointed. The cake was a bit dry which I was sure was due to my mixing error, but I did read that some of you other TWD-ers also ended up with dry cake. And to me that caramel does taste a bit on the toasty side, though it's not a hardship to eat it with the cake. I really want to take another crack at this cake and do everything just right because I believe this could be one of the most delicious cakes I've ever had.

Meanwhile, Abby did her glamour thing in the sunshine...tell me turtles don't smile.

What a ham...

TWD: Crème Brulée

Its Tuesday again and Dorie's here! Crème Brulée is up to bat, so let's get started.

Abby thought some calisthenics were in order in preparation for all the working out she's going to have to do to burn off the heavy cream.


This recipe said it yielded 6 servings so I tried to pour equal amounts of the base in 6 ramekins.

Took a hair over 60 minutes before I thought these seemed firm enough to take out of the oven, but here they are.

Chilled over night and then torched! My husband Walt actually brought the little torch you see right there to our relationship. Somewhere around our fourth or fifth date he packed a picnic that we enjoyed next to a little pond (this man knew what he was doing). When we got back to his house he busted out this torch to finish off the crème brulées he had made! Can you even imagine how impressed I was!! Well, I married him :)

The creme was a bit melty, but I could have popped it in the fridge for a few minutes like I saw several of you mention on the TWD crème brulée post; I'll probably try that tonight when we take down two of the four ramekins left. Yum.

I was very pleased with this experience. It was easy and the results are pretty impressive.

TWD: Dimply Plum Cake=YUM

Happy Tuesday once again, one and all. Today we have the Dimply Plum Cake. Which I ALMOST DIDN'T MAKE. After last week's debacle I didn't know if I had another challenge in me and for some reason "Dimply Plum Cake" sounded like "Darn this'll be Plum hard to make Cake" or something. So glad I persevered! This is DELICIOUS. Seriously people, I will be making this again.


First, please allow me to wax poetic over my butter picture. I am so proud of this picture. That top chunk there just happened to fall and land on its point just as you see it here. What luck! It brought a little bit of beauty to an otherwise ordinary day. (And now I'll wane with all the poetry)



A bit of the finished cake. It was SO pretty...and it smelled SO good...and I was SO pleased.



Andy as "Dimply Plum Turtle". He wanted me to point out how his shell is just peeking above the water just like those little plums...what, you say you got it? I told him you would, but he insisted.

Wee bit sinister, no?

As you can see I bought black plums because they looked prettier for some reason than the red plums, and I didn't see any Italian Prune Plums, though I was looking on Sunday and Monday was the OFFICIAL first day of fall, so I was probably jumping the gun. Italian Prune Plums are known for their punctuality (is that a word): neither early nor late.

There was some debate as to how many plums one could stuff on top of this cake. As you can see I got 12 halves in there in comparison to the 16 Dorie says she usually uses. Though I do want to point out that the picture in the book looks suspiciously like there are only 3 plum halves in a row. Anyway, I wanted a plum for breakfast so I am making the excuse that I could only fit in 12 halves.

I followed the original recipe as written. I did include the cardamom (man, that stuff is expensive! I'll be looking for excuses to put cardamom in everything just so I can get my (x-number) dollars worth out of it (sorry for the censorship...hubs might be reading this...babe, seriously just don't ask how much it cost...its better this way)).

And now for the gory facts of life: all good things must come to an end. My small group and I set upon this pretty little number before it knew what happened. They were SO impressed with how pretty it was, and they all seemed to find it tasty. There was a suggestion that I take the skin off the plums before cooking next time as they were difficult to cut with just our forks.

Make this cake. It is simple; it makes an impressive presentation; it smells delicious; it tastes even better; it is great for breakfast. If you are so unhealthy as to eat cake for breakfast. No further comment.

Tuesdays with Dorie-Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops

Another first: my first week participating in the Tuesdays with Dorie baking extravaganza. And what a recipe to start of with. It's got chocolate; its got malt; its got Whoppers...what more could a girl ask for??

Actually I was quite relieved that my first recipe would be a fairly straight forward cookie assignment. I've looked through Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours and there are some intimidating feats of baking prowess in there! The Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops were just the thing to get me started: kept me on my toes, but didn't terrify me entirely.

Note: You will notice that link to the book takes you to Amazon. I actually bought my book from the used selections there on Amazon. I paid $4.72 plus $3.99 shipping. My book was described as "like new", and I can find absolutely nothing wrong with it. This is the fourth book I've gotten at a shockingly low price through Amazon's used book offerings, and I highly recommend considering this option when buying your books in the future.

After procuring my ingredients (complete with chocolate malt powder as my local grocery store didn't have the regular) I got down to business Sunday afternoon. I actually did my best to achieve a semblance of mise en place (I am always getting to some critical point and then reading, "Cut 10 apples into star shapes" or some such nonsense that pretty much ruins the recipe I've impatiently started. Not this time!).


See that tiny little glimpse of my hand in the corner? Look how fast I'm moving! Chopping whoppers like the wind! Took me like 10 minutes to halve these suckers. Chopping eventually gets faster, right?


Look at that mish mash of chocolate...I'm not sure Dorie would approve...or maybe she'd just be happy that the masses are baking and wouldn't worry so much that their chocolate didn't all come from the same family. I used 2 ounces of Dagoba's 74% New Moon bar (organic chocolate, YUM), 3.5 ounces of Ghirardelli's 72% Midnight Bar (also YUM) and 1/2 ounce of regular old Semi-sweet Bakers chocolate (nothing wrong with it from what I can tell!). I am somewhat of a candy collector, so its a very good thing for me to dispose of a bar or two every now and then to help whittle down my stash...and in some other way than me just sitting down and eating it. Sigh, good times...

Here we have the butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla all mixed together. At this point Dorie says not to worry if the batter looks curdled. Thankfully mine never really looked curdled which is good because I would have worried.

Let's get us some dry ingredients in there. Dorie says it "will look more like fudge frosting than cookie dough--and that's fine". I'll say its fine...actually, ladies and gentlemen, cookies will not be necessary today...me and Mr. Fudgie Frosting Batter have a little date with a spatula...sigh, ok, ok, I can't fail this mission...must actually bake some of this dough.

But first let's say hi to Abby and Andy the wonder turtles. Look at Abby there with dreams of flying high...using poor Andy as a launching point. Abby, you'll never get far if you push others down in your climb to the top.

Now for the whoppers and chunks of that mish mash chocolate. Do I seriously have to stick this in the oven? We could have such fun together, just me and this luscious batter...no one would have to know.

Will power out the whazoo, people, that's all I'm sayin. Here you see a portion of the finished product. I baked some of the cookies on regular sheet pans and some on an airbake pan, and I did notice quite a difference after they cooled and today when I took them to work. Those baked on the regular pan were puffier (examples seen in this picture), a bit crispy around the edges and cake-y in the middle, and I thought they tasted better than the very soft, flat, slightly fudge-y specimens from the airbake pan. However today, the crispy/cake-y lot had lost a lot of their flavor, were boring even, while the soft/fudge-y ones had gotten even better with a deeper, richer flavor. I wasn't complaining about having to eat either kind either day, mind you, but I did enjoy comparing the results from each pan. I should also say that due to a scheduling issue the airbake batch did have to sit out for about an hour before actually being baked, so I'm sure that had something to do with the texture difference, too.

These were not difficult to make, and the result was different than any cookie I'd had before because of the malt powder and whoppers. Definitely give these a try! (Or at least whip yourself up a batch of the batter and grab a spatula...)

What a delightful experience! I can't wait to for my next Tuesday with Dorie assignment!