Leftover Halloween Candy Brownies

Busy is good, right?

I made some brownies and tossed some of the leftover Halloween candy in them for a game night a few weeks ago.

There's Twix, Butterfinger, Snickers, and Pumpkin Spice Hershey Kisses. I liked the Twix, and would not recommend the Kisses. The Snickers melted away in an interesting manner, but were still good.

Getting in the Holiday Sprit

I picked up a winter chocolate mold kit from the grocery store (it was on sale and I have poor impulse control). It came with white chocolate, so I pulled out my Wilton gel food coloring set and colored some red for the snowman's accessories and some blue for the snowflakes. Then I used up the rest of the dark chocolate I had laying around in the baking cupboard, and made a couple striped snowflakes to finish off the red/pink and white.

Holiday perfection!

Sunday is for Baking

This week, I'm making French Onion Soup. This recipe really pops when you use sourdough bread and Gruyere. Living in Indiana, we don't really have good sourdough here, and the one place we can get it from has a very thin, soft crust that I hate paying $6 a loaf for. It was time to revive my sadly neglected and dormant sourdough starter, living in a Ball jar in the fridge. Since it would take a few feedings to bring it up to happy, I went looking form some simple recipes to use the discarded, not-very-active sourdough in, and King Arthur Flour had just what I needed.

Happy sourdough, fed and doubling in size

Using the semi-active starter discard from feedings three and four, I got some amazingly light and airy popovers, one batch with cheddar cheese and lemon thyme for dinner on Saturday (no pictures, we ate it too quickly!) and one batch for breakfast on Sunday with various jams. You just whisk the five ingredients together and toss it in the oven for 30 minutes; this is a great, easy recipe, and perfect for anyone who is actually discarding and feeding their unused starter weekly as recommended. I may in fact start doing that just so I can make these popovers every weekend!

With apple butter!

Using my now very happy starter, I made a loaf of sourdough bread using a very basic recipe from Cultures for Health. Many other recipes have you adding additional yeast to shorten the rise time, but that really cuts down on the sourdough flavor and takes over from your local yeasts living in the starter.

Finally, I made a couple of loaves of simple sandwich bread using my take on this recipe (and accidentally turned the temperature up too high - d'oh!)

• Proof 4.5 tsp yeast in 2.5 cups of warm water
• Mix in 1 Tb melted butter, 1 Tb salt, and ~7 cups of flour
• Knead for approximately 10 minutes, or until the dough stretches instead of tears when you pull on it.
• Let rise covered for 1 hour, punch down, divide into loaf pans, let rise for another hour
• Bake at 450 F for roughly 25 minutes

The best part about bread baking is that it's a little bit of hands-on time every hour or so. Mix the ingredients for 10 - 20 minutes, work for a solid hour, then take a break and punch down the bread. It provides both an excuse for taking a break (must do step next on the bread) and a reason to not take a break (you have to stop at the end of the hour anyway, just keep working 'til the timer sounds). And then you get bread! Now, do I freeze the second loaf from each batch, or will we eat the first loaf too quickly?

RAT Cake

In my PhD program, our qualifying exam is called the Readiness Assessment Test, or RAT for short. My husband just had his oral defense, so I baked a rat cake for him:

I should have taken in-progress pictures. It turned out very well, amazing considering I've never done most of the techniques I used for it. The poured fondant on the "cheese" cake base was a bit spotty on the sides, but no one really cared.

Both cakes were quick one-bowl cakes from Joy of Cooking, the Blitzkuchen recipe. I baked the rat in a loaf pan, then cut it and shaped it in a triangle-ish shape, kind of like a pinewood derby car. The "cheese" cake was baked in an 8"x8" Pyrex square pan. Both had a warm apricot jam crumb coat. I made almond-flavored fondant and used it in a couple of ways. I covered the "cheese" with yellow poured fondant and made some of the rest pink for the ears, nose, and tail. The rat is frosted with Joy of Cooking's Creamy Decorating Icing, a shortening/powdered sugar/milk blend flavored with a dash of almond and vanilla (that is pretty much exactly the frosting my grandmother always made). I used a grass/fur (multi-opening) tip but instead of using it in the traditional way and making the "fur" stand up, I dragged it slowly across, allowing the strands to curl like fur. I like it better than the usual fur frosting method. I considered making eyes and whiskers but figured I'd stop while I was ahead and leave it be.

Everyone enjoyed it, and I learned a lot. Things like:

• Make sure to wash the sides of the pot while making the fondant or you may have some seed crystals that make your final fondant contain some crystallized sugar bits, giving it a bit of a crunch.
• Don't let the apricot chunks go onto the cake if you want a smooth cake without apricot chunks.
• Brown gel coloring doesn't get too dark. Just a bit of black to darken it up will cause your brown rat to be a grey rat instead.
• Fondant really does need 24 hours of ripening. It really changes the texture.
• The "grass/fur" tip makes better looking fur (in my opinion) when you let it kind of spaghetti across, like what I did, instead of making individual fur bits. 
• Vanilla cake, apricot glaze, and almond (fondant) or vanilla/almond (frosting) flavors work very, very well together.
• Don't thin the fondant too early. Instead of waiting for it to fully melt, I added a generous helping of boiling water to thin it and had to add more of the reserve fondant back in to thicken it again. I also had to wait for it to cool and thicken more before I could get the sides, which is why they have such poor coverage.

Any requests?

Japanese Sweets (Wagashi) Making

I can't exactly call these candy, but I went to a workshop on how to make Japanese sweets from bean paste. Yup, bean paste. The flavor takes a bit of getting used to, but now I kind of like the creamy sweetness once or twice a year, as long as there's some really bitter Matcha, Japanese powdered green tea, to go with it. It is a very fall thing for me now, and one of the things I think I'll miss from Japan. I'll probably be able to find the sweets and tea powder in the US, or make some bean paste from scratch if I really wanted some, which is good.

Anyway, on to the sweets! No pictures of the actual process, because this stuff is like sticky Play-Doh, and bean paste covered hands just don't mix with cameras well. Basically, you take the more savory center bit, typically one large chunk of red bean paste, roll it into a ball, and then take the colored, sweeter pastes, cover the center with them, and make any designs you want. We made three different sweets, and it really was just a chance to play with edible Play-Doh for grown-ups. I will have to keep this in mind as a good Girl-Scout-type future activity, with cultural, edible, and creative components. My finished sweets:

For this one, when we had finished covering the inner bit with the green and white outer stuff, we wrapped it up in a clean cloth to create the wrinkled outer shell.

This one is a peach. Or at least, it's supposed to be. I'm not sure if the leaf is bean paste too or not, but it was edible!

 

For this one, the outer shell is something similar to the leaf from the peach, a more solid jelly-like thing. You break up the large square into small strips using a strainer, and then just pile it around the red bean paste ball.

Of course, they look nothing like professional sweets, and if you want to see a gorgeous sampling of them, search for "Wagashi", or go here.

Dinner Party

Lee and I are giving a dinner party tonight. I'm in a food and wine pairing class, so we're making the menu that is my final project for a few friends. They're in town for some fraternity stuff, which I am not really a part of, so while they're off, I figure I should probably start our carrot reduction, since it takes hours and there's only hours until we serve it. I call him to see if he wants me to start it and what exactly I should do, since I wasn't home when he made it the first time. He said to chop the carrots into little pieces. We've already learned that the kitchen implements and I don't get along. Lee gets along with the kitchen. He makes culinary masterpieces that delight the senses and tantalize the taste buds. I burn broccoli and make glue when I'm trying to make gravy. Anyway, engineers are problem solvers, and so I solved the problem of getting the carrots into little bits so the blender doesn't choke on them:

And we got a funny looking carrot in the batch too, so I put that in the picture. The dinner party:

Appetizer
Originally uploaded by UnFrogged

We started with sea scallops and Terra Exotic chips with a carrot reduction flavored with anise, salt and pepper. A blenderfull of carrots was pureed with a cup of water and a splash of orange juice. This was left on the stove for hours until it looked powdery and had a consistency somewhere between baby food and clay. The reduction was left thick as a dip for the chips, and cream was added to thin it for the scallops. Each end of the scallops was dipped in an anise/salt/pepper rub and pan seared so it was still juicy on the inside. The plating had some chips stuck into the dip so as to keep them out of the scallop juices and therefore still crunchy. Martini and Rossi Asti was paired with this course. Originally, we were going to go with Iron Horse Brut, but when taste testing, it was too dry for the sweetness of the carrot/anise sauce.

Salad Course
Originally uploaded by UnFrogged

The salad course was just a plain salad to showcase the pairing of the wine and vinaigrette, but plated to keep it fancy. A row of cucumbers, Boston lettuce piled on top, and some carrots next to the greenery with Newman's Own Raspberry and Walnut Vinaigrette was paired with Dievole Tuscan Rosato. This pairing was considered by the guests to be the most interesting, because the wine and salad took on different flavors when tasted together. The tanginess went away and the fruit flavors were brought out in both wine and dressing.

Entree
Originally uploaded by UnFrogged

The entree was pork tenderloin, roasted and cut into medallions, with a habanero jerk sauce, chipotle mashed sweet potatoes, and sweet corn on the cob. The jerk sauce is one of Lee's favorite, most made recipes. He calls it the sauce of happiness. It's good, but usually pretty spicy. The sweet potatoes are mashed with some cream and some chipotle peppers, and have a very smoky flavor but smooth texture. We were going to grill the corn, but the grill is nearly out of gas and we didn't want to risk it. We're not going to refill the whole propane tank since we'll be moving shortly. The wine pairing to go with this was Drylands, a Pinot Noir from New Zealand. I was trying to go with a wine that could handle the smokiness of the potatoes and the spiciness of the sauce while not overpowering the corn and the pork. This was also the only completely untested pairing, and I was quite happy with how it came out.

Dessert
Originally uploaded by UnFrogged

For dessert, we had Bananas Foster on Perry's Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and Nilla Wafers. I made this dish five times the week before, attempting to perfect the recipe. I've learned a bunch of what not to do and got it really good once. You need bananas to be on the far side of ripe, with about 2 Tb butter, 3 Tb brown sugar, 1/4 tsp cinnamon, and 1/8 tsp nutmeg for the sauce. Melt the butter, sugar, and spices in a large pan on low heat (3/9 on our stovetop) until bubbling. Put 4 large bananas (split lengthwise and then cut each half into four pieces) into the sauce and cook about 5 minutes per side. Add 1/4 cup rum and light. Pour over ice cream. This was paired with Blandy's Rainwater Madeira, a dessert beverage that went really well with the Bananas Foster. I did not like it on its own, or with the bananas, but it did pair well.

And that was my lovely dinner party. Delicious food, good friends, and copious amounts of alcohol.