Birthday!

Wow...if I wait 3 more days then I can say I took a 5-month hiatus from my blog whereas blogging after 4 months and 20-something days makes it totally obvious that I was just a slacker.

Now you know the truth.

Stuff happened, and I'll blog about that later, but first here's a post that has been languishing in my drafts folder since about November 20.

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7 weeks ago we added 2 younguns to our house. And we're all still alive to tell about it.


One morning last week during the rush out the door to school I reached the zenith of my desire to inflict bodily harm on a certain 7-year-old, and I don't just mean a simple spanking. I wanted to hurt that kid. You will be proud to know that I didn't.


Really I don't know that you should be proud; I'm an adult, so giving in to my desire to inflict bodily harm cannot be an option...unless I'm inflicting my own bodily with harm by eating a cone full of ice cream for lunch...which I did today (*bliss). You will be relieved, maybe, or less likely to call the authorities if I go on to say that instead of inflicting bodily harm I dropped her off at school...ha, take that, kid.

And I simmered down and that was a good thing.

November 6 was my 28th birthday! 28...sounds so weird. Its been 10 years since my age had an 8 in it. And a lot has changed since then. But I don't feel so different, you know?

Hubs decided to make me a birthday dessert. You may remember the picture perfect chocolate cake he made last year. I had forgotten all about it until I saw it again on the blog. That's why I need a blog. So I can remember all the sweet things hubs does for me.



He asked what I wanted; I produced the recipe for Pumpkin Chocolate Cheesecake pie from my way-too-extensive recipe file (recipes go in, but do they ever come out...).



He made it happen! It was SO good!

Yes I shared it with the girls.


But only the tiniest slices ever.



Refined sugar is not good for our kids, folks. I had to eat it all...for the good of the children...



Because he made it I let hubs play with a piece...



Poor scared pie.

"They" say that you should photograph slices of things with the point facing you, as if the food were looking at you (do I want my food looking at me?), so that the viewer feels connected with the item in the photograph.


This piece of pie is almost looking at you...its looking at something over your left shoulder.

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.

TWD: Chocolate Chunkers!

Tuesday again! Hi there, Dorie! We're back!

This week we tackled the "Chocolate Chunkers". One look at the picture in her book, and I knew these would be good.


Do you get the same feeling when you look at my picture? Ha! Really you should get the feeling that these are the lonely specimens of baked dough that came out of the oven actually looking sort of like cookies. These were not the breeze that last week's Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops were.

Wait, what I meant to say was: I decided cookies shaped foods were passe this week and found Dorie's suggestion that these be crumbled over ice cream much more compelling, so I just skipped right to that part: crumbles.




First off: the chocolate roster. If I remember correctly there were at least 19 ounces of chocolate in this dough: 6 ounces of semisweet plus 1 ounce unsweetened melted first thing; 6 more ounces of semisweet, 6 ounces of milk or white and come cocoa powder added in later...dang! Dorie basically took a chocolate bar, threw some raisins and peanuts in there and melted it all together. Why I didn't think to do that before...

In which we meet the beginnings of a luscious cookie dough...

And somehow the luscious factor is cranked up even more...

So since I ate all that dough in the previous picture, do you think I could just make little piles of the mix-ins on the cookie sheet and come up with something yummy still??

OK, I'm just kiddin! That dough was in fact under all those mix-ins. A girl can dream though, right? Dorie says that once the chunky bits are in there will be more of them than there is dough. To say the least, dear readers.

At this point there was a hitch in our thus-far flawless plan. I had to be somewhere and there was no time to bake the cookies. No matter; Dorie assured me that the dough could sit in the fridge for up to 3 days. Several hours later I came back home, turned on the oven and pulled a rock-hard chunk of cookie stuff out of the fridge. 19 ounces of chocolate, remember. I basically had a giant Chunky bar (remember those?)...this did not bode well for me ending up with cookies. I decided to leave the dough out and bake the cookies the next day.

At the appointed time the dough was still not feeling like behaving, so I basically took a pile of dough crumbs and mix-ins and mashed them together as tightly as I could into cookie-type shapes and quickly put them on the cookie sheets before they could fall apart...or at least just before they fell apart in the oven.

The turtles knew something was wrong...

Andy wouldn't come near me...(he's hiding behind his plastic island with the plastic palm tree)

Abby gave me the turtle evil eye if there ever was one.

(Am I starting a tradition with these turtle pics...is that annoying?)

Here we have a nice pile of Chocolate Chunker dough that has been warmed slightly and left to lie where it may. Oh, I was so frustrated...while this stuff tasted good, the few cookies I did end up with were ugly as could be. Wonder what I should have done after chilling the dough to end up with actual cookies that stayed together? Next time I'll plan for a time I can bake the dough right away.

In the meantime, where's that ice cream?

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!