The cake is in...

The most recent update was a solo mission. I (Chrissy) was down for the weekend so Rebecca and I did not do much blundering on Sunday. Instead, while I was at home I decided to whip up a new cupcake idea. This had some good experimenting going on. I made a devil food cake into cupcakes. Easy enough. But for a new little kick I added red cayenne pepper. Yes, I added pepper into a chocolate cupcake. Let me just say the better was tasty :) I popped those into the oven and 20 minutes later they came out smelling delicious, and looking perfect. For the frosting I decided to change it up and make a chocolate ganache. I've never made one before so it was super interesting....and it comes to find out, super easy! I melted one cup semi-sweet chocolate chips with one cup heavy whipping cream. Once that is smooth and creamy I added two tablespoons of butter, stirred, and let it cool in the fridge for 45 minutes. No problem. I then had to whip the mixture into frosting form so I pulled out my handy-dandy mixer and beat the mixture on a medium speed until it came out to the consistency I wanted. Finally I had to put it into the piping bag. (I'm kind of a freak about decorating stuff. I like to make it super fancy :)) 

Here is where my funny came into play. Somehow, the ganache frosting tumbled out of the top of the piping bag and landed everywhere but the bag, bowl, or cupcakes. It hit four different spots on the counter, my arm, and the floor. How does that even happened?! Laughing, I scoop more into the bag (successfully this time) and start frosting the cupcakes. They came out really well. Nothing spectacular because I think I whipped the frosting too long. O dear, I'll just have to try making it again. Whoever will eat all this chocolate? ;) 

I started to run low of frosting (since my first five were heaped with it lol) so I tried to make it a little more even.   Top them off with a little cayenne for a dash of color and done! They looked beautiful! Unfortunately, I am unable to eat them due to oral surgery several days ago. So tomorrow my unsuspecting victims....I mean friends....will have to try them out and tell me what they think. I'll make sure to post an update on what everyone thought of my hot devil cupcakes :) 

Easy Enough A Two-Year-Old Could Handle It......Or Not.

Today was all about experiments when it came to our recipes……as usual.  Thanks to Pinterest, we found two amazing-sounding dishes to try: “Crack-N-Cheese” (obviously a spoof on Mac and Cheese), and Silk Chocolate pie (a perfect addition since it is, in fact, our pastor’s wife’s birthday; and every pastor’s wife needs silk chocolate pie on her birthday).  Easy enough a two-year old could handle it….or not.  Incidentally, even the simplest-sounding recipes seem to turn into ridiculous challenges (kind of like the ones on the tv show “Chopped”) when we are in the kitchen.  And even BEFORE we are in the kitchen, really.  Take, for example, our trip to the Wal Mart in Columbia to try to find pasteurized eggs to use in the pie.  Yeah, I think we forgot that we live in a small town.  Upon asking where we might find pasteurized eggs we were given the response, “What’s a pasteurized egg?”  “Well, we were kind of hoping the pasteurized egg carton might tell us that!”  Time to consult good ol’ google.  It turns out pasteurized eggs are heat-treated eggs to prevent the occurrence of salmonella in uncooked foods, such our silk chocolate pie.  Who knew?  It also turns out the Columbian Wal Mart does not carry obscure items…such as pasteurized eggs.  Next stop: IGA.  Surely a grocery store would carry something comparable to pasteurized eggs….not that we knew WHAT exactly was comparable to these apparently unheard of delicacies.  Again, no luck.  We did, however, spend about 10 minutes staring at the shelf of eggs in hopes that a magical box would appear out of thin air.  Or maybe we were hoping God would give us a revelation as to what to do next.  Either way, we stared and stared, and finally decided a carton of egg whites would have to do (by this point we had entered full experimentation mode), triple-checking, of course, that the egg whites were indeed pasteurized because, as Rebecca put it, “It’s never a good life decision to poison your pastor’s wife with salmonella-ridden egg whites.  Especially not on her birthday.” 

Upon returning to the house, the baking commenced…..as did the mishaps.  Mishaps such as accidentally purchasing margarine rather than butter (and subsequently finding the words “DO NOT USE MARGARINE” in the recipe book), opening the drawer to find about a quarter of the vanilla that was supposed to be there, and receiving a text message of hysterical laughter from our cooking mentor, Bridgette, in response to our questioning about the process of pasteurizing eggs.  Nevertheless, neither one of us is much for backing down from adversity, so onward we pressed.  Thankfully the crust-from-scratch recipe was a fairly easy one to follow.  Mix flour, shortening, salt, and ice water, roll it out, press into a pie pan, bake for 11 minutes, and you are good to go.  The chocolate filling, however, proved to be a different story.  The “butter” did not want to cream as well as it should have, the vanilla/sugar/butter mixture wouldn’t fluff up, and then there were the egg whites…..which only amounted to 7 eggs-worth when the recipe called for 8.  Again we pressed onward.  Ha!  Finally a step we can handle!  Melt the unsweetened chocolate in a saucepan (PS: don’t eat unsweetened chocolate. It tastes like chocolate for the first second, but quickly turns bitter in your mouth.  PSS: this also applies to cocoa powder…..minus the “it tastes like chocolate for the first second” part.)  The recipe says the mixture should come out nice and fluffy……ours came out like cake batter.  Close enough.  Time to toss the pies into the fridge in hopes of the sloppy chocolate mess firming up and somehow coming out looking remotely appetizing.  And “pastor’s-wife’s-birthday-worthy.”

Next we move on to the main course: Crack-N-Cheese!  Shell pasta, butter, cheddar cheese, bacon, milk and cream cheese.  Now THAT sounds like our kind of recipe!  As I (Christina) am triple-checking the recipe, Rebecca goes to check on the boiling water and pour in the noodles.  The recipe calls for 4 oz of noodles.  She poured in the whole box…….16oz.  “I like pasta,” she responded.  Maybe that’s why they call it “crack-n-cheese”.  Moving on, the noodles are cooking, Christina is cooking the bacon, and Rebecca is quintuple-checking the recipe.  Next step: melt butter in a pot, whisk (in our case stir) in flour………and then just look at the mixture.  The book says to cook 2tbs of butter and 2tbs of flour for 5 minutes.  Problem #1: we used the biggest saucepan in Rebecca’s kitchen.  Clearly there was not enough of the nasty-looking mixture there to cook for one minute, much less five, so we went ahead and added the 1 1/2 cups of milk and brought that to a bubble.  Yes, it said a “bubble,” not boil.  Once that was done we added the cream cheese and stirred until it thickened.  So far, so good!  Now came the fun part: adding 4 cups of shredded cheddar cheese, paprika, and salt and pepper.  Needless to say, with 4 cups of cheddar cheese, it was a very cheesy sauce J Mix in the chopped bacon (YUM!) and noodles.  And yes, we somehow used ALL of the noodles….it took a lot of heavy-duty stirring to get that mixed up.  The final step was putting the concoction in a pan, adding MORE cheese, and baking until it was golden brown.  After 15 minutes, the verdict: “Super hearty and delicious!  The bacon added a great flavor without overpowering.  The paprika was the perfect seasoning for it.”  A perfect meal when combined with a tossed-together salad, using whatever vegetables can be dug up from the fridge.  One success chalked up on the board tonight.  But there still remained one un-finished challenge: the pie, which had at this point been chilling in the fridge for over two hours.  It’s on.  We made whipped-cream for the pie which turned out to be surprisingly easy with the help of the Strawberry Shortcake Easy Cookbook CJ loaned us after our last kitchen escapade (which I just realized we haven’t blogged about yet…..it will come).  Heavy whipping cream, sugar, vanilla, and a splash of hazelnut.  Multiple taste tests revealed this particular recipe did not contain enough sweetness to satisfy the desires of our sweet teeth (Rebecca always says that “every tooth she has is a sweet one”), so we decided to pour in some more sugar.  You can never have enough sugar, right?  Turned out to be just what we needed, so we took the test pie out, decided to ignore the little jiggle in the middle, and proceeded to slather the cream on top.  As Christina cut into it and began putting the pieces on the plates, the entire pie began to suck into itself….you couldn’t even tell we had cut any of it out.  Yeah, the pie kind of…well, it was glorified pudding J  In hopes of the second one being a bit more set, we scooped out a big bowl of whipped cream, covered the pie, and headed over to deliver the birthday greeting.  We tried putting candles on it, but….well, if you have ever tried putting candles in pudding, you know how well that went.  It basically ended with the two of us laughing hysterically on our pastor’s unlit front porch and scrambling to keep the candles lit and upright, while our pastor stood on the other side of the door prepping his shotgun to ward off whatever intruders had made their way onto his porch.  Ok, so he didn’t really have his shotgun….but we did get accused of freaking him out (ironically his sermon this week was on “fear”) by standing on his darkened porch, giggling and holding falling firesticks.  

So today, was a day of experiments, and while there might have been many bumbling and blunders, everything tasted fantastic and many laughs were had by all.  Thus far there have been no reports of anyone getting sick…..or worse.  However, as I sit here in my room wondering about the best way to close this post out, I’m wondering if we should have had Kellis bless the pie before we ate it.  That way at least the eggs whites would have been PASTOR-ized.

Super Bowl Sunnnndaayyyyy

As many of you know, yesterday was Superbowl Sunday. This is a day for
food, friends, and football. Most of the day we spent wondering what
food we could bring to the party our friends were hosting. There had
already been one request for pigs in a blanket so that was on the
menu, but what else could we make to diversify the food without
leaving the football “festivities.” As we surfed the web looking for
different recipes we finally came across one for homemade Mozzarella
Sticks. Check mark! That was the plan. A couple of weeks ago we also
made pepperoni dipsticks so we decided that was a must addition
because they were so good!
So onward to the recipe! It called for string cheese, eggs, milk,
flour, parsley flakes, canola oil, and Panko bread crumbs. It sounds
easy enough. The scariest part of the instructions was the “flash
freeze.” After rolling the string cheese in the flour, then in an
egg/milk mixture, and finally the bread crumbs and parsley, we had to
put the un-cooked mozzarella sticks in the freezer for 20-30 minutes.
Apparently, that is what a “flash freeze” is. While the cheese sticks
were in the oven we heated the oil and worked on the pigs in a
blanket.
For these all you need is croissant rolls and little sausages. You
take two triangle croissants and put them together by rolling them out
with a rolling pin or the side of hand. Chrissy seemed to fail at the
hand portion so she took to just rolling the little piggys up after
the dough was cut into thin strips. Once the oil was finished heating
up I (Chrissy) abandoned the pigs and went to frying the cheese
sticks. Now, make sure the oil is not turned up above medium heat
because you will burn the cheese sticks (and your hand as my thumb
found out.) They do not take longer than a minute or two to cook. They
should come out a nice brown color. Also, the cleaner the oil the
faster they cook. Once they were done I just put them on a napkin
lined tray and snapped a lid on.
The first batch of pigs in a blanket were done by now. Now please
remember, when you go to take something out of the oven, make sure you
are wearing an oven mitt or that your pot holder is covering you hand.
Rebecca, that means you :D So, as we are removing the pigs in a blanket
and putting them into a bowl, one of the pigs decided it wanted to be
a nudist. Various calls of “naked pig” and “pig down” were called and
we commenced to laugh hysterically with tears in our eyes. Most of our
cooking sessions end up with one of us (usually Chrissy) laughing in
the floor.
Those two recipes were done, but it was almost 5 o’clock, kick off
started soon, and we still had to make the pepperoni dipsticks. After
a couple of minutes deliberating we decided to prep them here and
finish cooking them at our friend’s house. So croissant rolls,
mozzarella string cheese, and pepperoni. 5 pepperonis and half a
string cheese per triangle and roll! That’s it. Cook at 375F for 11-13
minutes and done! In another blog we will play catch-up on previous
recipes we tried before starting the blog. These are stories you won’t
want to skip reading.
We rushed over to our friend’s house (where they had recorded the game
thanks to some nifty device that records television) popped the
dipsticks in the oven and went downstairs to wait on the food to
finish. Pause game, run up to get food (some did need a little
reheating, but everything came out wonderfully!) and run back down for
the game. (And what a game that was!) There was so much food there and
fewer people than we thought were going to show. Despite that, we
barely took anything home. And so ends out Superbowl Sunday menu.
There were a lot of laugh, and some tears (because we were laughing so
hard!) And we can’t wait until our next Sunday cooking adventure!

Welcome to the cooking blog of Chrissy and Rebecca! We have decided to take you along for the ride of our wild cooking adventures in our kitchen. Along the way I am sure you will find some interesting recipes as well as several cups of laughter. Look out for exploding pans and the smoke coming out of the oven, but we do hope that you enjoy the commentary of our hilarious attempts at creating a variety of meals and masterpieces. See you in the kitchen!