Category — Food

For Christmas I wanted to make a dessert. A quick look around my mom’s pantry and I found a couple jars of sour cherries; perfect for a black forest cake. I went off and found a decent recipe at allrecipes.com and wet about putting the cake together. I was actually amazed at how simple it was to make.

Despite how easy it was a made a few mistakes. Like after I made the cherry filling, and started to put the cake together, I didn’t cool the filling long enough and put it on the whip cream only to have the cream start to melt. That was bad. I had to scrape off all the cream and filling and cool things down a bit longer.

My next mistake was having to freeze the cake rather than put it in the fridge. We had no room in the fridge so we put it outside to cool. This didn’t allow for the cream and cherries to mix with the cake layers as much as they should have. Finally my last mistake was pointed out to me by our Bavarian neighbor, and was more of a mistake with the recipe. Traditional Black forest cake is made with Schwarzwaelder Kirschwasser, or if you don’t have access to that, needs at least some rum added to it. I had no booze, and the cake seemed to lack that little bit of zing alcohol seems to add to a dessert.

All in all I am happy with how the cake turned out for a first attempt. Next time though I expect perfection and will be sure to make a few modifications to my recipe.

Banana bread is probably one of the first things I baked when I moved out on my own. It is extremely easy to make, a great use of old over ripe bananas, and is a delicious snack to have around. I have made banana bread so many times now I really don’t need a recipe, and can usually just wing it.

So when I noticed a few of my bananas turning black I decided I would do something with them. Instead of sticking to making my standard loaf of banana bread, I thought I would give muffins a go. Generally when I make my loafs I stick to just banana walnut, but thought with muffins it might be nice to have a bit of chocolate in them. I have to say the muffins turned out fantastic, and I will definitely be making them again soon. Here is the recipe:

1/4 cup butter
3/4 cups sugar
1 egg
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 ripe bananas (mashed)

1 3/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt

3/4 cup walnuts
3/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. In a stand mixer cream together butter and sugar. Once the butter and sugar are nicely mixed together add the egg and continue beating and wet. Mix in yogurt and vanilla to create a nice wet batter. Finally with a spatula fold in the mashed bananas. In a separate bowl mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Then fold the dry ingredients into the wet mixture 1/4 at a time, until fully integrated. The mixture should be pretty sticky at this point. Finally mix in the walnuts and chocolate chips into the batter.

Fill greased (or lined) muffin cups to the top. Bake for about 20-25 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool for a few minutes before transferring muffins from the cups to a wire rack.

Give this recipe a shot, and let me know if you like it.

So after making two batches of Tiramisu I was left with 14 egg whites, and no idea what to do. My first thought was I could have omelets for the next week every day. However that didn’t really appeal to me. So the next thing that came to mind was how about making an Angel Food Cake? As a kid I loved angel food cake. My mom would often make it for my birthdays. I loved how fluffy and light it was, and how well it picks up the flavors you mix it with.

As far as cakes go, angel food cake is one of the easier ones to make. Basically you start with roughly 12 egg whites (about 1 1/2 cups) at room temperature, and beat them at high speed with a touch of salt, about 1 1/2 teaspoons of cream of tartar, 1 cup of sugar (add gradually as you mix the whites) and your choice of extracts (I used vanilla and almond). Once the egg whites have formed stiff peaks you will gradually fold in a sifted mixture of 1 cup of confectionery sugar, and 1 cup of flour. Once you have fully folded the flour mixture into the egg whites pour the batter into a angel food cake pan and cook at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. See, easy.

Once you take the cake out of the oven you can invert it onto a plate and wait for the pan to cool. Once the pan is cooled you can remove the cake from the pan. If you like you can also cut off the browned top of the cake if you don’t want to have that chewy bit on your cake.

As I said earlier, one of the best attributes of an angel food cake is that it is a very light cake, but also that it acts as a sponge and takes on the flavors that you put on it. For my cake I went an easy route, and made some whipping cream, and a raspberry sauce. For the raspberry sauce I just heated some frozen raspberries in a small pot, added some rum, a touch of sugar, and a small cornstarch mixture to thicken.

So on the cake I just put on a dollop of whip cream, then added the warm sauce on top. It made the cake look a bit volcanic, and tasted great.

After making the angel food cake I still had egg whites left over. So I thought I would try my hand at making some French macarons. I have read horror stories from people online about making macarons, so I did a lot of research before hand so that I could get them right. Even so I still made a bunch of mistakes, and well they didn’t exactly turn out how I wanted them too.

My first big issue was that my piping skills were absolutely terrible. I hadn’t pipped anything since probably highschool, so I was really rusty. Also the circles I made for the cookies were way too big. I didn’t realize the batter would span out so much, which was too bad. Lastly I ended up making the chocolate ganache the day before and had it in the fridge. However that made the ganache extremely hard. So I heated it up over indirect heat, however when I did that it made the oils separate from the chocolate, which turned into a colossal mess. I would have been better off just making the ganache when I needed it.

Overall the flavor of the macarons was still good, but I was still disappointed with the result. Next time I should know better, and hopefully I can correct the mistakes I made on my first attempt.

The first time I tried Tiramisu was in Germany when I was 16. My mom took me on a European adventure to visit my brother Robert in Italy, and my brother Richard in France. We arrived in Germany, and spent our first few days with some friends of the family living close to Frankfurt. The wife of the people we were staying with is a fantastic cook, and I knew from previous visits that we would likely be treated to a royal feast. So after stuffing myself on the delicious home made German cuisine that was made for us, out came the dessert. It was a home made Tiramisu, and boy did it blow my mind. The richness of flavors, the satiny smooth mascarpone cheese, the hit of expresso soaked lady fingers. Lets just say I was sold, and the week spent in Italy I would have a new tiramisu almost nightly.

After coming back from Italy this summer I was reminded of my love affair with tiramisu, and decided it was high time I learned how to make it. So off to the internet I went to find a good recipe. I decided to try this recipe as it appeared to be a pretty traditional tiramisu:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/tyler-florence/tiramisu-italiano-recipe/index.html

I found it was actually relatively easy to make the Tiramisu, especially if you were prepared with all your ingredients before hand.

From the recipe I ended up using way less lady fingers, as the ones I had must have been bigger than the ones from the recipe. In addition I went with a little more rum to give it more of a kick. It was fun getting to use Marsala in this recipe as it created a lovely aroma in my apartment when making the zabaglione.

All in all I was very happy with the way my Tiramisu turned out. I think in the future I will get a little more adventurous and get a nice round dish to make it in, and experiment a bit with the recipe. For a first time though, I was quiet happy with the results and would fully recommend this recipe.

Baked some chocolate chip cookies today. It is a pretty standard recipe I think I initially found on allrecipies.com. Basically following the common ratio of 1 cup butter to 2 eggs and 2 cups sugar.

Some people like their cookies thin and crunchy, if that is the case then this recipe might not be for you. However if you are a fan of a meaty moist cookie then look no further!

Here is the recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Best-Chocolate-Chip-Cookies/Detail.aspx. Give it a go for a tasty treat.

Milk and Cookies Moustache: