Milk made from butter

My Dad recently had his birthday (although out of town without me) and I can never turn down an excuse for cake making, so I decided to embark on this recipe. I was nervous about the amount of coffee considering what a bad Seattlelite I am (hot chocolate any day), but this cake was so good and so moist and so did not taste like coffee that it was clearly worth it. So instead of doing the mountains of homework I have, I adapted this cake recipe. It originally called for a ganche frosting, but I decided to go head over heels with chocolate and pair it with fresh whipped cream instead.

Fun anecdote of the day: When I was shopping for buttermilk (which I did not find as the recipe below reveals) I asked for the help of a friendly Safeway employee. His reply, verbatim: Is that milk made from butter?
Also, it turns out that I suck at cake decorating. This is so structurally unsound and the first cake came out of the pan more in crumbs than a cake form. And by the time the cake had been frosted for half an hour three serious cracks had appeared. So I would follow Smitten’s advice on the parchment/wax paper because she clearly had a point.


Double Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Filling
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Cake Layers
3 ounces semisweet chocolate chips
1 1/2 cups hot brewed coffee
3 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch process)
2 teaspoons baking soda
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
3 large eggs
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup milk
3/4 teaspoon vanilla extract

Brew coffee and cover chocolate chips with it, stirring until all melted and smooth. This takes a little while. In the meantime, beat the three eggs into a consistent mixture. Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Add in all other ingredients. Grease three round pans (I had enough batter to fill two eight inch and one ten inch which was the best I could with available cookware) and line with wax/parchment paper then fill with batter. Bake at 300 for 50 minutes to an hour and ten minutes.


Raspberry Filling
12 oz frozen raspberries
¼ cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch

Thaw the raspberries and then blend (I had to add about a fourth cup of hot water to get a more liquidy mixture), push through a sieve (or whatever mesh you can improvise) into a pot to get rid of seeds. I found the back of a spoon pretty helpful. Add in the sugar and cornstarch and bring to a boil, letting thicken. Wait to completely cool to spread between layers.

Frosting
1 carton heavy whipping cream
Sugar to taste

Combine and mix until fluffy. Use to frost outside of the cake (I used as filling for the second layer to mix things up and put more raspberry on top).

This is really good. Like, maybe the chocolate cake I've ever had even if it is super ugly. Seriously, go make this, right now.

The ugliest Papple Pie

The awesome thing about having friends that are adults is that sometimes they have houses. And sometimes, those houses come with trees. And sometimes those trees bear fruit, as in the case with my friend Kari’s house with its papple tree! And maybe papple isn’t the proper term (pear plus apple? Yes) but it is so much more fun to say than Asian Pear which is what the fruit is technically called.

So I foraged a bag of fruit (legally this time, with permission and everything!) and decided to make a pie. The response to this was generally, “A, pear, pie? I’ve…never had that.” But I’m never one to shy away from experiment. I’ve never made a pie before, and so maybe I should have like, rolled out the crust and the like, but this turned out good. You want to keep an eye on it because mine turned out a little burnt. It tasted more like a coffee cake than anything because the crust had that texture and the filling ended up smooshed down.

Adapted from Group Recipes
Papple Pie

8 pears, sliced*
½ a lemon’s juice
1 lemon’s zest
½ cup white sugar
¼ cup brown sugar
1 tbls cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg
¼ cup flour
Pie crust recipe plus cinnamon, doubled

Preheat oven to 350. Spread bottom crust out, combine all other ingredients in bowl for filling that toss into pie pan. Spread half of curst dough out on top of pie, make holes for venting. Cook for 50 minutes. I let mine sit for a day before serving to le tthe flavors settle, and served with ice cream.

*The recipe calls for peeled pears, but I honestly like to leave the peel on most things I eat

Not so tarty tarts

I’ve been busy moving (into my parent’s basement like every successful cliché) and unpacking so haven’t had a chance to post this yet. The recipe title for this was a Brandy Tart, but it much more resembled a not crumbly coffee cake to me. Good, just not super dessert tasting. The recipe calls for mextaxa or other good Brandy, and we used Christian Brothers Brandy so whatever you have around (or if you’re under aged like me, can get people to buy for you) should work fine.

I lucked out with my family; my Uncle married a very nice woman who has very nice parents who are amazing Greek cooks. Every Thanksgiving we have normal Thanksgiving and then Greek Thanksgiving. This recipe comes from their wonderful cookbook.


Adapted from Papas' Art of Traditional Greek Cooking
Brandy Tart

5 eggs, separated
½ cup sugar
½ cup brandy
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
½ tsp pure almond extract
1 cup farina
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp ground cloves
1 cup sliced almonds

Beat the egg whites in an electric mixer until stiff. In a separate bowl beat egg yolks and sugar until fluffy. Add the brandy, vanilla, and almond extract and beat for an additional two minutes. Add farina, baking powder, cinnamon, clove and almonds together, then slowly fold in the egg whites a little at a time with a rubber spatula. Slowly add this to the brandy mixture. Butter a ten inch spring form pan (I used a normal 8 inch pan), and pour in the batter, spread evenly. Cook for 30 minutes at 375 degrees.


One of the suggestions the book gave (that I didn’t follow but sounds pretty damn good) was pouring basic syrup on top as a sort of glaze. I’m including the recipe here so you can try it out. It would also be good with ice cream I think, but then again I think everything would be good with ice cream.

Basic Syrup

4 cups water
8 cups sugar
½ cup fresh lemon juice
2 oranges cut in half
2 lemons cut in half
2 cinnamon sticks
1 cup honey

Add everything but honey, and bring to a rapid boil. Continue to boil until thickened, about 20 minutes. Remove pan from heat and remove cinnamon sticks, orange halves, and lemon halves. Add the honey and stir well. Refrigerate to cool completely for later use.

Happy Birthday Cupcakes!

Let me preface this: mixed reviews. As in some people thought that these were delicious, and some people were not big fans, and no one really asked for more than one, so on the whole, pretty average. Better when they first came out, and I think I paired the wrong sort of frosting with them so I’d either eat them as sweet muffins, or use a butter cream, so I’m not including the frosting recipe.

However, they were pretty adorable cupcakes, and I made them for my friend Ilana’s birthday (23!), even though she requested chocolate. Which, upon reflection probably makes me not the greatest friend, but I should get an ‘A’ for effort considering I foraged these raspberries. And that is illegal, according to a nice police office I chatted with hours after the fact. But you know, good to know. Anyways, all the recipes I found had jam in them and I wanted to use real fruit so that was something, and I very loosely based it off this recipe.

Adapted from We Are Not Martha

Lemon Raspberry Cupcakes
Makes 22

1 ¼ sticks butter
2 eggs
1 ¼ cup self rising flour
½ cup lemon juice
1 ½ cup raspberries
1 ½ cup powdered sugar

Beat butter (softened) and powdered sugar together until it is a fluffy. As a first warning, this is the weirdest batter, it is just so fluffy and light and I felt like I had beat egg whites and not made a batter. Then add in eggs, then flour and lemon juice slowly. Now, beat in softly by hand raspberries. Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and spoon batter into cupcake/muffin pan. Mine needed to cook about 28 minutes, but the original only suggests 23 so keep an eye on them.

These are the rules: All parts of the food must be grown within 150 miles of where I’m out. My exemptions are olive oil, baking soda and powder, salt, and yeast.

The morning started out with some blueberries (Olympia) drizzled with clover honey (within 150, but not sure where, they were a gift) for breakfast. I need to make sure to buy milk, because just drinking water is a little sad for me right now. Obviously this needs no recipe.
After a shopping spree at the farmer’s market (flour! I have flour, thank God for Bluebird farms), I headed back home to start cooking.

Adapted from Allrecipes.com
Blueberry Muffins

1 ½ cups whole grain flour (local)
¾ cup honey (local)
½ teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 egg (local)
¼ cup olive oil
¼ cup milk (local)
1 cup fresh blueberries (local)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Mix together honey and flour, then add salt and baking powder. Add in egg, oil, and milk, and finally fold in blueberries. Grease the muffin pans (I used olive oil spray), and fill about halfway. Put into the oven and cook for 20 minutes.
Since I substituted honey for sugar, I changed the recipe to cut down on the olive oil and milk, if you’re going to use sugar the original recipe would probably be better to follow. These are good, but not the best muffins I’ve had. They taste and look pretty healthy though.

For lunch, I chopped up a sweet onion and part of a giant zucchini from the farmer’s market, and threw it in the sauce pan with a little olive oil, basil and oregano (both fresh from my garden). Not really worth a whole recipe, but pretty tasty. It’d have been good with some salt too, but I was trying to use the less non local ingredients that I could.

The best kind of family heirloom

Remember in elementary school when everyone got a chance to bring in cupcakes on their birthdays? I never did, because no matter how many times teachers promised an end of the year party for all summer birthdays it never happened. So maybe I’m overcompensating in that now even though I’m in college I’m still bringing baked goods to class. At least this time it was for a potluck.





I love my Mom for many reasons, and while most of those are unconditional support, love, etc, another is these bars. These bars are like crack to me, and an instant hit anywhere (proof, they were completely gone less than six hours after cutting into them), and so easy that its almost embarrassing. Because everyone wants to know what’s in them, and when you reveal that it only has 5 ingredients it just doesn’t seem so impressive. But that doesn’t matter because it is still damn tasty.

Adapted from my Mother who adapted it from her mother, etc

ChocoCoco Bars

8 oz of coconut flakes
1 can of sweetened condensed milk
10 graham crackers
8 teaspoons butter
1 ½ cups semisweet chocolate chips

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
Crush the graham crackers. I do this using a fork in a bowl, but I’m sure there are easier less labor intensive ways. Melt the butter (and the more you use the more these will stick together, their major flaw is being so crumbly) and mix it in before pressing the crackers into the bottom of an 13 by 9.5 pan (though this is pretty easily interchangeable).
Spread coconut flakes over graham cracker crust. Spread chocolate chips over this. Open the can of condensed milk, and dump it evenly over the entire creation. Bake for 20 minutes.

Cautionary tale: These are so crumbly that you will just help yourself to little morsels until you realize you’ve eaten half the pan. So I highly recommend that you wait until you’re at a place filled with people before starting to eat.

Chocolate Chip Cookies!

Today, my friend Sarah received a present in the mail, and while most of us would be content to send a thank-you note or text, Sarah decided that cookies were in order. And who am I to argue against the baking of cookies?

So off we went to Trader Joe’s (though the ingredients can be found at any grocery store) and picked up eggs and chocolate chips, which conveniently had a recipe on the back of the package for chocolate chip cookies. Naturally of course, Sarah refused to listen to reason insisting that she had a much better recipe for chocolate chip cookies, which as it turned out not half an hour later is the recipe on the bag of Trader Joe’s chocolate chips. With a small change in the ratio of sugars of course.
These cookies were delicious, and definitely the classic chocolate chip variety.

Recipe adapted from Trader Joe’s and Sarah

Sarah’s Cookies

2 ¼ cups of flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
¾ cup brown sugar
¾ cup granulated sugar
1 cup softened butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
1 package chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine butter, brown sugar, granulated sugar, and vanilla extract and beat until creamy. Then add in eggs and keep beating, finally adding in all the dry ingredients and at the very end (once your batter has reached desired consistency) stir in the chocolate chips.
Drop mixture onto greased cookie sheets (canola oil did the trick for us), in small balls (maybe 1.5 inch diameter) and bake for 10 minutes. Makes about 24 cookies.

The cookies looked really white when we had finished, but were fully cooked and as previously mentioned, really tasty. This whole process was also super easy and fast, if you’re ever in a hurry to whip up something simple and delicious.