The Bread is in the Baking

I just want to start this out by recognizing the food blog I got this recipe from: Smitten Kitchen. If you've never checked out this blog, go look at it.

Right now.

Okay, now to the cake. This is a really wonderful rich chocolate cake. The wine makes the cake light and fluffy while also giving it a bit more depth. I love it. I made it for one of my close friends for her birthday and I just doubled the recipe so I can make a layer cake for a joint birthday party some other friends of mine are having tonight. It's also the perfect 21st birthday cake, cause it's got alcohol in it, but it's still really luxurious, so it's not one of those cakes that slaps you across the face, screaming "ALCOHOL" at you. Make sense?

Chocolate Wine Cake

Cake
6 tablespoons (85 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup (179 grams) firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup (50 grams) white granulated sugar
1 large egg + 1 large egg yolk, at room temperature
3/4 cup (177 ml) red wine, any kind you like (being a college student, the three buck chuck from Trader Joe's worked just fine)
1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract
1 cup + 1 tablespoon (133 grams) all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (41 grams) Dutch cocoa powder
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon table salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line the bottom of a 9-inch round cake pan with parchment, and either butter and lightly flour the parchment and exposed sides of the pan, or spray the interior with a nonstick spray. In a large bowl, on the medium speed of an electric mixer, cream the butter until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until fluffy, about 3 minutes. Add the egg and yolk and beat well, then the red wine and vanilla. Don’t worry if the batter looks a little uneven. Sift the flour, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon and salt together, right over your wet ingredients. Mix until 3/4 combined, then fold the rest together with a rubber spatula. Spread batter in prepared pan. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. The top of the cake should be shiny and smooth, like a puddle of chocolate. Cool in pan on a rack for about 10 minutes, then flip out of pan and cool the rest of the way on a cooling rack. This cake keeps well at room temperature or in the fridge. It looks pretty dusted with powdered sugar.

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When I got back to Portland from visiting Seattle I stopped by Trader Joe’s before heading home to pick up some groceries. Figuring my housemates had eaten most of the eggs we had in our fridge I bought another dozen eggs.
Only to come home and discover that there were still 8 eggs in the fridge. They hadn’t eaten a single egg while I was gone.
So what’s a girl to do?
Go online and find a cake recipe that uses 6 eggs.

I changed a couple of things when I made this cake:

The original recipe calls for orange zest, but I didn't have any oranges in my house when I made this, so no zest! I also used olive oil instead of vegetable oil and nonfat Greek yogurt instead of whole milk Greek yogurt. I spread some strawberry rhubarb freezer jam I'd made earlier in between the layers of the cake. The original recipe calls for a butter cream frosting, but I'm not the hugest frosting fan and I didn't have any powder sugar on hand. The cake may have looked prettier with it, but without frosting it is light and fresh tasting.
All in all the cake still came out wonderfully.

French Yogurt Cake
3 cups all-purpose flour
4 tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
2 cups sugar
1 cup skim milk Greek yogurt
6 large eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
½ tsp. almond extract
1 cup olive oil
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two 8" round cake pans with butter.
Whisk the dry ingredients together.
Mix the sugar, yogurt, eggs, vanilla and almond extracts. Whisk vigorously until well blended. While whisking, add the dry ingredients, then switch to a larger rubber spatula and fold in the oil.
Divide the batter between the two pans. Bake for approximately 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean. (The top will be golden and the cake will come away a bit from the sides of the pan.)
Transfer the cakes to a cooling rack and let them cool completely until ready to assemble. After the cakes have cooled slowly cut them each in half and spread the jam of your choice between each layer. Enjoy!

The picture is a little creepy, I apologize. I'll change it to something less menacing the next time I make the cake.

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You know that stuff that you can get at the candy stores? Let me be more specific, it's covered in chocolate and when you bite into it and it's crunchy and crumbly all at the same time. It's one of my favorites and I stumbled on a recipe for it!
It's also gluten free, so my housemate was able to get in on the treat. Making this is super simple and the last few steps made me feel like I was a five year old on 4th of July.

Chocolate Sea Foam


1/4 cup grams honey
1/2 cup minus 1 tablespoon light corn syrup
2 cups sugar
3 1/2 teaspoons baking soda

Prepare a sheet pan (preferably with sides) with a piece of parchment paper or aluminum foil and brush it with a thin coating of butter or oil.

Combine the honey, corn syrup and sugar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan--one large enough to allow the mixture to quadruple in size (which it will do when you add the baking soda at the end). Moisten the mixture with enough water so that there are no dry patches of sugar; then wash down any stray sugar crystals that might be clinging to the side of the pan.

Set the pan on high heat and cook and cook and cook until a candy thermometer reaches 300 F or, if you don’t have a thermometer, until the mixture turns a light amber color. While the mixture is cooking, do NOT stir it at all. Stirring can cause the sugar to seize (one moment it’s fine, one moment it’s hard and crystallized). Don’t worry about it mixing properly, it will do that on its own when it starts to boil.

When the honeycomb is sufficiently cooked, take the pan off the heat. Dump in all of your baking soda and whisk vigorously until it is well combined; while you whisk, the honeycomb will foam up dramatically. After the soda is whisked in, gently pour the mixture out onto a prepared pan and allow to cool completely, about one hour.

Once cool, break into smaller pieces and dip in chocolate if desired. Store in an airtight container or the honeycomb will suck moisture out of the air, leaving an unprotected initially crisp candy sticky and gooey in a matter of hours.

Total Time: About 2 hours

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I just moved into the house I will be living in for the next year. Whew. I can start baking more often again and I can stop living out of my suitcases! All of my things are now unpacked and put away and the only thing I have left to do in my room is put my posters up!
So far only 2 out of the 3 of us have moved into the new house so we had a pre-house warming house dinner to celebrate! Mooney doesn't eat gluten so we actually made this recipe with gluten free flour and it worked out great!
This recipe was supposed to be for shrimp (thus calling this coconut seafood because any seafood will do) but when we went to Trader Joes they didn't have any uncooked shrimp! I was really disappointed. Mooney suggested we use cod instead so we grabbed some of that.
 We got frozen cod, which worked fine, we just thawed it out first by placing seafood in a water bath. If you are using fish, place the fish in a sealed plastic bag in the water bath. You should not use already cooked meat because when you deep fry it, the meat will be overcooked.

The recipe I found for the coconut shrimp was really fatty so I left a lot of ingredients out and it turned out just fine, nice and crunchy! This meal goes really well over rice, which you can start while you're waiting for the seafood to marinate.

Coconut Seafood
1/2 lbs of meat of your choice (cut into 1 inch pieces)
1/2 lbs of broccoli cut into bite size florets
About 2 cups of oil
1 lemon

Seafood marinade
2 tbs cooking wine
1 tbs salt
1/2 tsp pepper

Coating for seafood
About 2 cups of flour
2 cups of medium shredded coconut
2 eggs (well beaten)

Mix together the marinade and place the seafood in the marinade for about 15 minutes.  Prepare the coating for the seafood by whisking the eggs in a bowl and shaking out about 1/4 cup of flour and 1/4 cup of shredded coconut onto separate plates. As you coat the seafood add more flour and coconut to the plates, but not putting all the flour and coconut on the plates, less of it is gummed up by the egg when you toss the seafood in it.
After the seafood is done marinating, take 1 or 2 pieces at a time and dip them into the egg and then coat them in the flour and then the coconut. Place the now coated seafood on a plate or baking sheet and repeat until all the seafood has been coated.
Heat up the oil in a deep pan or a deep fryer. While the oil is heating up, place the broccoli in a double boiler to steam, while you are frying the seafood make sure to check the broccoli ever 4-5 minutes to make sure it hasn't been overcooked and cook to taste (I like my broccoli to be just a tiny bit crunchy, which takes about 10 minutes). After the broccoli is cooked place in a large bowl (you'll add the seafood soon)
After the oil has heated up, place about 5-10 pieces of now coated seafood in the pan/deep fryer. Leave the pieces in the oil for about a minute or until golden, flipping the seafood at least once. Use a slotted spoon to take the seafood out of the oil and place on a plate covered in paper towel to soak up the excess oil.

Toss the Broccoli and now fried seafood together and squeeze the lemon over the broccoli and seafood. If you want something more flavorful, you can also use any other sauce you like!

Total Time: About an hour

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Started getting a little hungry around 10pm, was sick of the almonds I have for munching on and had a craving to make muffins.

When I was younger my twin sister and I went through some different baking phases, one of which was a muffin phase. Our mom has a little cookbook of muffin and scone recipes and we just went through it and made all the muffins that sounded tasty. Then making muffins became too easy and we stopped.

But back to tonight. I have a craving for muffins, specifically spinach cheese muffins.

Problem: All the recipes I found called for ingredients I didn't have on hand
Solution: Try to come up with my own recipe based kind of sort of on a recipe I found. I took out the butter (because there's cheese in the recipe, no more fat needed), chives and instead of using Parmesan (which would have been really great) I used a Mexican mix (that's all they had at the student store). I am currently sitting here hoping that they don't come out like rocks.

They didn't come out like rocks! In fact they're really light and golden brown and just a little crispy on the outside and light and fluffy on the inside.

Spinach Cheese Muffins

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 egg
• 1-1/2 cups milk
• 1/2 cup chopped fresh spinach or 1/4 cup frozen chopped spinach, thawed and well drained
• 3/4 cup Mexican cheese mix

Preheat oven to 400° F
Whip the egg and milk together and then add all the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Batter will be thick and very sticky. Grease muffin pan with olive oil and pour batter into each muffin tin. Place in the center of the oven rack and bake for 20 minutes or until a light brown.

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So I got off work yesterday and checked my phone to see if I had any missed calls, and I did! From my extended family in town inviting me over for dinner! I called back and said that I would love to come for dinner (and it was a good thing I did, because dinner was delicious). But you can't go over to someone's house last minute for dinner empty handed, so I went on the trusty FoodGawker and found a really quick and easy recipe for coconut cake!
Seriously, this is one of the easiest recipes ever. It takes about 15 minutes to mix all the ingredients together (and I did this all by hand, so imagine doing this with a mixer!) and then you pop it in the oven for 45 minutes and voila! It's also light, airy and not too sweet.
The only thing I changed in this recipe is that it asks for cornstarch (which is a thickener) and I didn't have any, so I added more flour (the recipe asked for 1 tbs of cornstarch so I added 2 tbs of flour) instead and it worked fine.

Coconut Cake
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 cup and 2 tbs flour
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cup shredded coconut
125 g melted butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup milk
powdered sugar for sprinkling

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit because this is not going to take long!
Mix flour, baking powder and coconut and mix. In a separate bowl, beat eggs and sugar until pale creamy and then add the milk and cooled butter to the mixture and stir together.  Mix the dry and wet ingredients together, adding the liquid ingredients slowly. Then Grease an 8 inch angel food cake pan with butter or vegetable oi and then sprinkle it with flour and remove the excess flour.

Pour the dough into pan and level the top. Bake 40-45 minutes, checking the cake with a toothpick or small knife. Cool cake 5 minutes in the form, then turn over onto a wire rack.
Sprinkle it with powdered sugar and serve.


Total Time: About an hour

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I came home from work today and I was craving something sweet, but being low on money I could only use supplies I had in my kitchen and the only oil I have in my kitchen right now is olive oil. I'd seen some cake recipes floating around the interwebs with olive oil in them instead of vegetable oil or butter and was interested in giving one of them a whirl.
This one was the only one that fit my parameters exactly and it came out really great (so great, I'm pretty sure I've eaten half of the cake by myself...). This cake is dense and silky with wonderful flavor and the glaze really helps bring out more of the flavor.

Lemon Olive Oil Cake
3/4 cup olive oil (don't feel the need to use really fancy olive oil, I got mine from Trader Joes)
1 large lemon
1 cup all-purpose flour
5 egg yolks
4 egg whites
3/4 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 cup powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8 inch springform, or 9 x 5 inch loaf pan with olive oil and line with parchment paper. Grease the parchment paper and then dust with flour.

Grate the lemon zest from the lemon and mix together with the flour in a medium bowl. Juice the lemon.

Quickly beat together the egg yolks and 1/2 cup sugar for about 3 minutes and then slowly beat in the olive oil and 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Add the flour mixture and fold in gently with a wooden spoon or spatula.

  Using a mixer, beat 4 egg whites high speed with the whisk attachment until foamy. Continue to beat on high, slowly adding 1/4 cup of sugar until soft peaks form. Fold the egg whites into the cake batter until just combined. Pour into the prepared baking pan and sprinkle with the remaining sugar.

Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 45 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes in the pan, then remove to a wire rack to cool completely.

Prepare the glaze by whisking together the powdered sugar 1 tablespoon of the fresh lemon juice. Add more lemon juice if necessary to get the desired consistency and pour over the cooled cake. 

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