Sugar Shock, part 2

Not only did I buy a bag of Butterfinger ® mini's, I also was, err, enlightened to buy a bag of peanut M&M's ®. And enlightened I was because it spurred me to use them in yet another baked treat!

This time, I visited the M&M's ® website and decided to fiddle around with their Chocolate Marbled Blondie recipe.



The difference is that I used dark brown sugar instead of light brown, I added a 1/4 tsp of salt and instead of fat-free cream cheese, I used Neufchâtel. And those honkers on top of the blondies? Well, they are peanut M&Ms ®. I like them better than the regular.

Why? Because these are what I had in my pantry and salt always makes a baked good better. It balances out the flavor and enhances it as well. So always remember to add a bit of salt to your baked goodies to make it all that much better!



Enjoy!

Sugar Shock, part 1

There something about the duality of Halloween that is really cool. On the one hand, it's the night before All Soul's Day when the dead walk and "scare" the living. On the other hand, it's a night where children (and adults) can go nuts over candy.

I luckily live on a block where there are tons of wee ones in costume that I can make light up with handfuls of sugary goodness. And I don't skimp on the good stuff - Reese's Peanut Butter ® cups, M&M ® Peanut (and regular because allergies to abound), Butterfingers (r), Hershey's ® Miniatures.

No candy corn, dried fruit or pennies. I had too many encounters with those "treats" when I was a costumed fiend and still remember not being too happy about it.

Anyways, I was thinking that since candy is so cheap and plentiful this time of year, I would score a few bags pre-Halloween and make me some goodies.

I remembered making Butterfingers ® cookies once, and decided to make them again!



Butterfinger ® Cookies

Ingredients
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter or margarine, softened
1 large egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup coarsely chopped NESTLE BUTTERFINGER® Candy Bars

Directions
Preheat oven to 375°F. Lightly grease two baking sheets.

Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Beat sugar and butter in large mixer bowl until creamy. Beat in egg and vanilla next. Then, gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in Butterfinger pieces. Drop by slightly rounded tablespoon onto baking sheets.

Bake the cookies for 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Makes about 2 1/2 dozen cookies.



The best part about these cookies is that they don't stick to your teeth, unlike the candy that's in them. And they go really well with a nice cold glass of 2% milk. So...healthier?

Happy Halloween!

Bananas!

It's been a while since I've posted, but I blame school. And life. And, for some reason, a hectic social schedule.

But of course, I couldn't go for too long without baking, so when I saw this awesome pile of slowly browning bananas on my kitchen table, I knew I had to do something.


So I found this recipe and decided to use the brownest of my bananas and whip up a batch of muffins for Sunday breakfast. And you know what, I am always amazed when recipes come out quick and tasty after the first try.

Banana Muffins with Cinnamon Streusel Topping

Ingredients
1 1/2 cup of all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 very ripe bananas, mashed
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten
1/3 cup canola oil
1 tsp good vanilla
for the streusel:
3 tsp dark brown sugar
1/4 cup flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp butter

Directions
Preheat oven to 375 degrees and grease muffin pan if you are not using muffin liners.

Mix together flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt. In another bowl, mix together bananas, sugar, egg, oil and vanilla.

Pour banana mixture into dry ingredients and mix until just moistened. Spoon batter into muffin cups.

In another bowl, mix together brown sugar, flour and cinnamon. Cut in the butter until it resembles a coarse meal. Sprinkle amply on top of the muffin batter.

Bake muffins from 18-20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.



And voila - quick, easy morning muffins. The whole house was smelling like warm bananas and cinnamon - what a great way to start the morning! Well, it was for me. The whole process took about 40 minutes, which is more than enough time to surprise family, friends or a "special friend" with tasty in the morning. I say if you have some bananas that you don't know what to do with, make this!

Low-Fat?

Well, due to a serious health scare in my family, I've decided to include "low-fat" as part of my baking vocabulary.

Now, I know that I might have mentioned before that using substitution to make a cookie, cake or other baked goodie "healthier" ends up making the baked good taste a little less authentic. Who am I kidding, they end up tasting "fake".

An essential ingredient in most baked items is butter. Good, golden, creamy, fattening butter. According to the International Food Information Council,

In baked goods such as cakes, fats help produce a high, fine texture. When "creaming" fats and sugar—the first step in mixing many cake batters—fats trap tiny air bubbles that help the batter to rise. Fats also help keep dough and batter from separating and falling. And fats coat the proteins in flour to make a tender or flaky product.

So when there is little or no fat in a baked good, you end up with a drier product, or worse - a flavorless one.

But the topic of this post is "low-fat" and so I decided to try my hand at a low-fat brownie. What ended up happening was me creating a low-fat, richly satisfying treat that even my sugar-crazed brothers could love. The secret? Low-fat, plain yogurt and a little baking powder.

Yogurt Cocoa Brownies

Ingredients
1 cup of granulated sugar
6 TBSP cocoa powder (any kind will do)
10 TBSP low-fat yogurt
2 large eggs
1/8 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup + 1 TBSP all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cup dried cranberries (optional)
1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips (optional)

Directions
Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease an 8 x 8 in. baking dish (I use non-stick spray).

Mix together sugar, cocoa and yogurt until well blended. Add eggs one at a time until incorporated fully. Add vanilla and salt and mix well. Stir in flour and baking powder until it doesn't show and batter is creamy. Do not over mix.

Fold in dried cranberries and chocolate chips. (optional)

Bake for 28-32 minutes (when a toothpick is inserted, it should come out with a little of the brownie sticking to it).


Cool and cut into squares. Serve warm or room temperature with a nice cold glass of low-fat milk. Enjoy!

Blueberries!

With blueberries being $0.99 a pint at my local green grocer (well more like Chinese Superstore extravaganza - they sell everything there) I figured I'd buy a half-dozen and see what I could make with them.


Blueberries are technically not really blue, but purple. But it doesn't matter, the color is still so wonderfully rich and inviting, it would be a crime not to bake with them.



Of course, with the trusty internet on hand, I scoured Epicurious.com for a quick and easy recipe. And yes, the site delivered in the form of a Blueberry Crumb Cake.

And what I got was a light, fluffy, richly blueberry cake with just the right amount of crunch/texture on top for the crumble.

A perfect way to celebrate the blueberry in my opinion. Well, other than eating them fresh with some vanilla ice-cream.

Yum.

Irish Car Bomb?

Ever since I saw the recipe while perusing through smittenkitchen.com, I came across a recipe that I've been wanting to try out ever since I bought a six-pack of Guinness Extra Stout for a BBQ recipe. The BBQ sauce was a hit, and I finally got around to making these Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes yesterday.

What exactly is an Irish Car Bomb? Well, according to Wikipedia (my go to source for instant laymen knowledge)

An Irish Car Bomb is a beer cocktail which is a variation of the boilermaker. It is made with stout (e.g., Guinness), Irish Cream (e.g., Baileys), and Irish whiskey (e.g., Jameson).
The name refers the drinks Irish ingredients and to the car bombings notoriously used by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Troubles. The Jameson whiskey is floated on top of the Baileys in a shot glass, and the shot glass is then dropped into the stout. Once mixed, the drink must be consumed quickly because it will curdle.

The cake recipe itself was really easy to make, and it almost felt like the additional carbonation from the Guinness made for a seductively moist cake. Not to mention the maltiness of the Guinness melded perfectly with the organic cocoa I used.



The whiskey ganache was also relatively simple to make, but I think I erred in this case by not using a higher cocoa-content bitter chocolate. Next time, I think 65% or higher would work better. Read on and I'll tell you why.



The reason is because the frosting is so goddamn sweet! It's all butter, sugar and then Bailey's Irish Cream. With a higher cocoa-content in the ganache, I feel that the frosting will be balanced out. However, my brother's liked them - but my brother's liking my baked goods is subjective - they eat anything with sugar in it!



In the end, the cupcakes were a success and one of my brother's friends said that they would pay me for a batch. Pay me with gratitude.

The jury is out on whether I would like to be paid in "gratitude". Baking is hard work!

Bake-Off!

The bake-off idea was one I had been contemplating for over a year, based on a previous unfulfilled attempted from another yelper (Yelp.com is where yelper's hang out). With NYC being as diverse as it is and as a result having more restaurants than one could possibly know what to do with - people would like food. And possibly like to cook, and maybe even like to bake. In the summer.

On July 18, 2009 the weather was perfect. I had confirmation from the powers that be (a.k.a. Parks Department) that my event could be held and people said they would show up.

And some of them did and we had a good ol' time with my special "lemonade", gorgeous weather and lots of sugary confections. There were categories to be judged on and the ever popular, err, popular vote.




I made my Chocolate Chocolate Cookies and Orange Carrot Cake Cupcakes:













And here were some submissions from our other intrepid bakers:


Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

Chocolate Caramel Brownies

Sm ores Cookies

Once again, food = love, and baked goodies = big love.

Can't wait to do this again next year!

*photos courtesy of Nina C.

Stay Tuned

This is a temporary post that will force me to elucidate on my fantastically flawed bake-off, which happened on a sunny Saturday in early July.

to be continued...

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

In an effort to spread my love of baking among the Yelp community, which I am very vocal member of, I decided to host a bake-off.

The gist of the event was that people interested in baking would participate by bringing their homemade baked items to a pre-determined location in, oh say Central Park, and we would all compete for "prizes."

I was very excited because the turnout for the event exceeded my wildest expectations. And then it rained all week.

And on the day of the bake-off.

So I was naturally incredibly angry at the weather (futile, but necessary) and also at a loss as to what to do with my pre-baked goods. I made two batches of my Grapefruit Yogurt Cake in mini-cupcake format.

Luckily I have brothers. And neighbors. And co-workers.

What I am hoping is that my next attempt will actually be more than just an attempt.

Stay tuned!

Frozen, not stirred.

Lame James Bond pun aside, making ice-cream is just as labor intensive, if not more so, than baking a cake.

The recipe is simpler, but the process requires a lot more patience. So when I finally decided to use natures bounty of berries (strawberries) to make some ice-cream, planning went into this endeavor.


A day in advance, I had to freeze the ice-cream attachment for my KitchenAid and make sure that it was properly covered so that there is no contamination from other items in the freezer. Next, I had to make sure to find a simple enough custard based ice-cream recipe. And what do you know? Epicurious had one, which of course I modified. Modification in the sense that I used lemon extract instead of lemon rind and I didn't add the chilled macerated strawberries to the semi-frozen custard mixture, but rather some fresh frozen strawberries I'd been saving for a while.

The addition of the frozen strawberries actually helped the custard mixture set-up better, because in previous ice-cream making experiments it had turned to mush after adding stuff to the custard base.

And here's what else I learned - custard based (or French-style) ice-cream is moons and stars better tasting than American-style. It's also a lot fattier, so eat in moderation.

Enjoy!