Macarons in Seattle

This week, I headed out to Seattle to do a set up for a tradeshow. While I was there, I was able to hang out with my good friend Sarah from DePauw, and we decided to cook up some Tasty treats.

Sarah had attempted to make real almond flour macarons a few times without success. We decided to tackle this finicky cookie. We tried two different recipes, one of which was pretty damn good, the other was....not so good. For the purpose of being productive, I'll focus on the good ;)

We used a recipe Sarah found online for Fool Proof Macarons. Check it out here: http://www.myfoodgeek.com/2007/06/08/almost-foolproof-macarons/

The recipe called for everything in grams, so we busted out the kitchen scale, and pre-measured everything.

While Sarah was measuring, I started beating the egg whites with a hand mixer, until they formed soft peaks.

Then, Sarah got the Sugar-water syrup heating up on the stove.

We added the syrup a little at a time to the eggs whites, along with a little vanilla extract, and blue food coloring. we continued to beat the mixture until it got very stiff, and held its shape like-so.

Then, we added in the almond meal and sugar, along with the rest of the egg, and folded it all in.

Once totally mixed, we took turns piping the batter onto lined cookie sheets,

Then we baked them for 15 minutes.

While we were baking up all these blue Vanilla Macaroons, we decided to try to make some chocolate ones. They were sticky, and not light, and kept falling apart when we tried to remove them from the cookie sheet. Here's a peak. We didn't bother sandwiching them.

Not so good. Ok, let's move on back to the successful cookies :) time to sandwich.

And Sample. Yum. These cookies, according to Sarah, are not quite the delicious Parisian macaroons that she buys for large sums of money in the city. But they were the closest yet. The cookies were light, and slightly gooey, very tasty, and got even better when we filled them with dark chocolate Ganache.
Pretty!

And they matched Sarah's Gurgle pot. Perfect.

Good job team.

Shoofly Bars

When I was a kid, we used to go up to Maine to visit my uncle and cousins on Thanksgiving. Their dessert policy, which I highly support was “a pie per person.” My personal favorite, every year, was the shoofly pie. At the time, I had no idea what was in it. I just knew it was goey and sweet and yummy. Now, in all my adult wisdom, I know it involves one of my favorite, and infamously overstocked, ingredients: Molasses.

So when I came across this “Shoofly bar” recipe I had to try it. I don’t have the metabolism anymore to eat a whole pie, but I’m pretty sure I can get away with a bar. Or Four.

Ingredients:

Crust:
1/3 cup shortening
1 ¼ cups flour
1 tablespoon Sugar
¼ tablespoon salt
Filling:
1/3 cup snipped dates
¼ cup Molasses
¼ tsp baking soda
3 Tablespoons hot water
1 egg
Topping:
½ cup flour
3 tbsp brown sugar
¼ tsp cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
pinch ginger
¼ cup cold butter

First off, you want to make your crust, which is basically a simple pastry. Mix together the flour, sugar and salt in a bowl. Then cut in the Shortening using a pastry blender. You can also do this by criss-crossing two knives. I did that for a long time, until I spent the best 6$ of my life on this little baby.

Once your shortening is looking like small little floured pea-sized grains, moisten the pastry with cold water, one tablespoon at a time, tossing with a fork. Mine took 5 Tablespoons to be Moist enough to handle.

Roll your pastry into a ball.

Then roll it out, into a square. Mine looked more like an oval, but I made it work.

Lay your pastry in an 8x8 or 9x7 ungreased baking pan. Spread the pastry up the sides of the pan, I rearranged excess pieces since my shape wasn’t exact.

Next, Snip your dates.

Or you could by snipped dates, I bought whole, pitted dates, because I love doing extra work.

Sprinkle them on top of your pastry.

Next, we’ll make the topping. Mix together the dry ingredients, and cut in the butter using the same nifty tool shown above. You’ll want the end product to look like a grainy yummy topping.

Next for the filling. Mix your hot water and baking soda. Then add in your molasses and egg. This smells so yummy.

Pour this over the pastry and dates, as evenly as possible.

Then sprinkle on your topping.

Bake at 375 for 25 minutes, or until pastry is golden brown. Let cool, and slice!

Tada!

The flavor of these was great, but I think I'd make a few changes. First off, I would use butter in the crust instead of shortening. The "crust" was kind of bland. Secondly, I would add some melted butter to the filling, I thought the texture was a little off. Definitely a fun experiment!

Spider Cupcakes!

Last night I attended the annual "Octoberfest" party at my dear friends' The Kucaj's house, costumes required. I wanted to bake something "Halloweeny" so I decided to try to do some fun cupcakes. I saw a pictures of some spider cupcakes on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store, and it looked pretty simple, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

As far as the type of cupcake goes, I thought I'd stick to the fall theme and bust out the pumpkin. Pumpkin Spice cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting. yum-o.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar
2 eggs, room temperature
3/4 cup milk
1 cup pumpkin


Mix together all your dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and set aside.

Then cream together you butter and sugars (both white and brown). Add in your eggs one at a time, waiting until the first is mixed in to add the second, then add in your milk and pumpkin.

Next, slowly add all the dry ingredients, and mix just until well combined. bust out your muffin tins, and start spooning the batter evenly into paper muffin cups.

Bake at 375 for 25 minutes. The house smelled fabulous.

While the cupcakes are cooling, mix up your frosting.

Ingredients:

8 ounces softened cream cheese

1/4 cup butter

3 cups powdered sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

I added some food coloring to get this Orange hue in honor of Halloween. I accidentally squirted myself in the eye with red food coloring, which took an awful lot of make up remover to clean off of my eye lids. Try to avoid doing this if possible.

Next I decided to tackle the spider legs. In the picture I saw it looked like they used pull apart black licorice strings, which I couldn't find anywhere. So I thought I'd do a little sculpture with tootsie rolls.

I nuked the rolls in the microwave for about 10 seconds to make them nice and pliable, then I started rolling them out into long strings. This actually took forever. Finding licorice strings would be a better plan ;)

Next I frosted all my cupcakes. And ate, oh I'd about a cup and a half, of the cinnamon cream cheese frosting in the process. That stuff is deadly. Make some now.

Then I started making my eyeballs out of Necco wafers. I cheated and used store bought decorating gel for this part.

Next, insert your eyeballs into the frosting on each cupcake. At this point, I was starting to get pretty pumped because they looked pretty hilarious. I was laughing out loud at the little critters.

So fun! Eventually I ran out of Necco wafers but still had a few cupcakes. I scoured the pantry for something else I could use for eyeballs, and found some little hard candies that actually worked out quite well.
The final step was sticking on the legs and getting them into a safely-transportable container.

Tada! My army of delicious bugs. I ended up only putting four legs on each because I was running out of time. No need to be anatomically correct when you're making bugs out of cupcakes.

And here's me and the hostess at the party. She's Snookie from Jersey Shore. I'm a Facebook page.

Happy Halloween!