Carnival Bars

Hi everyone! For those of you who are still visiting this blog after my long hiatus (I'm too ashamed to go look at the date of my last post), I am so happy to have such loyal blog viewers! I just learned that I have had 818 hits thus far, and I think it would be really awesome to get 1000 hits; so if you feel the desire to obsessively check this blog, do so.  I am going to try have new posts each week to reward you for your efforts! On to my blog post: 

Usually, when people ask me if I did anything fun the past weekend, I say no.  Though of course I consider a weekend full of track meets and long runs fun, the non-runner population does not. Therefore, I just give the boring answer to avoid having to convince people that thirteen mile runs are enjoyable.....  However,  I can say for certain that this weekend, I did do something fun: I went to a carnival! One of the Junior high schools in town brings the carnival in, complete with a house or horrors, the Yoyo, the zipper and of course..... a Ferris wheel.  

My housemates and I decided to venture 10 minutes down the street to check out this junior-high student infested scene with the hopes of enjoying some rides.  Of course we should have known that being a fundraiser, the main goal is to raise funds... not provide college students with a cheap fun thing to do.  Therefore, we decided to just ride the epitome of all carnival rides... the ferris wheel.  Despite being made feel really old by being surrounded by so many youngsters, the 5$ spent on the ferris wheel was well worth it... I got some stunning view of the carnival: 

And some even more stunning view of Davis, California: complete with desolate farm fields, porta potties and trucks #no filter 

Anyways, because the treats the the carnival were outrageously overpriced, I decided to make my own treat to fill the void of a traditional carnival treat. I went to the grocery store and wandered around for a while deciding what to make. My conclusion: Peanut butter pretzel M+M Cake Bars; also known as Carnival Bars. This recipe is a bit exciting because I pretty much came up with it all on my own... well, more like I decided what I was going to add to this base cake bar recipe: 



1 pkg. yellow cake mix
1/4 c. butter, softened
2 eggs
1/4 c. water
1/4 c. packed brown sugar
1 (12 oz.) pkg. peanut butter chips 
1 (12 oz) pkg: Pretzel M+Ms 

Prepare 9x13 inch pan. Combine  cake mix with water, butter, eggs and sugar.  Add 1/2  of the peanut butter chips and M+Ms. Spread in pan.  Sprinkle remaining M+Ms and peanut butter chips on top.  Bake 20-25 minutes at 375 degrees.  


I took these out right in the nick of time.... nice try Gertrude. Andddd  they were delicious... they lasted an embarrassingly short amount time in my house. There obviously need to be carnivals more often! 

PS: I'm really excited about the camera on my new phone- must more high quality than my third generation iphone!  However, I tried to add a bit of artistic flair to my pictures with instagram....  not sure how I feel about that yet. Which pic is better?? I say #nofilter FTW. 

    #filter 

    #Nofilter

A little bit twisted...

Well, Gertrude officially decided to punish me for my lack of attentiveness to her and this blog lately.  Other than using Gertrude to make roasted sweet potatoes (aka. the staple of my diet), I have had very little time to do anything except for running and studying for the last few weeks.... Luckily, I am FINALLY on spring break. And that means Gertrude and I are reunited.

On Sunday night I wanted to make something, but I didn't really feel like going to the store because I had just gone a few hours earlier and spent wayyyyy too much money.  Whenever I don't feel like going to the store to buy ingredients for a new recipe, I end up making some sort of bread product.  I didn't feel like making just bread though, so I settled on soft pretzels!

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Mall-Pretzels/Detail.aspx

I loosely followed the above recipe with a few modifications:

1)I tried to make them healthy, so I substituted whole wheat flour for all-purpose flour
2) I accidentally put 2 cups of water into the dough (instead of 1.5).  The 2 cups of water was for the part when you dip the pretzels in baking soda with water! woops.... Didn't really seem to matter though.
3) I used my bread machine on the dough cycle because I accepted my inability to make dough.

Unfortunately, Gertrude decided NOT to cooperate.  Because the pretzels are fairly large, I had to do two batches.  I was very unhappy to see that the bottoms of the entire first batch were black... great, thanks Gertrude.  I also did not have any parchment paper, so that could have been part of the problem (I guess I shouldn't blame it allllll on Getrude).  Anyways, I took the burnt ones out and put the new batch in.  As I was waiting for the second batch to cook, I decided to try and scape off the black bottoms of the first batch because I thought the pretzels were salvageable.   I was surprisingly successful at this scraping effort, and as I was sitting there all pleased with my ability to save the pretzels, I realized I had forgotten about the batch in the oven.... big mistake.  Those ones were all black on the bottom and I pretty much gave up on trying to save them.

So, I ended up covering my six salvaged pretzels with melted butter with cinnamon sugar.... I put a fairly generous amount on to make up for the fact they may still taste a bit burnt.  Luckily they were pretty good...

Cake Cake Cake Cake Cake...

            It has been a long while since I blogged last.  While I would rather bake all day than study DNA replication or biochemical pathways,  in my life as a student-athlete, the word student comes first.... followed very closely by athlete.  Baker is sadly little bit behind (though I would love to call myself an athlete-baker-student).  Anyways, it took my lovely roommate's 21st birthday to break my baking drought. 

           Whenever I make a birthday cake, I do my very best to personalize the cake for the specific person. The recipient in this case  is a wonderful girl who loves to wear..... flannel! The idea of a flannel themed cake seems like a challenge I was willing to take on, especially with the help of my trusty sidekick (check out her blog at http://craftcoma.wordpress.com/).  Equipped with my new "Dessert decorator plus" (sounds legit, right?), I was ready go. 

          I had a bit of a busy weekend, so I was a bit lazy and used a boxed cake mix.  However, to make myself feel better for my lack of creativity, I decided to add some extra stuff to the cake to make it better.    I followed this recipe to a Tee and put the batter in two 9 inch pans: http://www.kevinandamanda.com/recipes/dessert/the-best-chocolate-cake.html.  Note the name of the recipe is "THE BEST chocolate cake".  It means it.  Seriously, the cake was amazing.  It turned out absolutely perfect.  I have found that spring-form pans also work wonders for turning out perfectly shaped cakes that do not require surgury afterwards. 

         For the frosting, I just used (cough* cough* doubled) the recipe: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/gale-gand/quick-vanilla-buttercream-frosting-recipe/index.html.  I used half and half instead of heavy cream.... you know, a low fat version :)..... NOT.  The decoration of the cake was the fun part.  As I wandered the mystical candy aisle at the grocery store, I was inspired by licorice.  I hadn't quite put it together in my head yet, but I knew I was getting somewhere and decided to make the purchase.   I was not quite sure about my roommate's stance on black licorice, so I deciced that the twizzlers would play the starring role in the cake.  After some serious help from Ms. Craft Coma, we created the masterpiece: 

 The twizzlers made the cake a bit hard to cut, but it was worth it.  What is the eagle, you may ask?? Don't worry about it. Until next time!!

I "knead" me some good bread

          This week I had probably the most hectic two academic days of my college career (a paper due and 2 midterms in the span of 24 hours), and the main thing that kept me motivated through the endless hours of cellular respiration and genetic recombination rates was that after the molecular mayhem was over, Gertrude and I would be reunited (actually we weren't reunited but I will get to that later). Despite my daydreaming while studying of making an epic recipe, after all my tests were over, I pretty much wanted to do nothing.  So basically, I "kneaded" a recipe that entailed me doing just about that: nothing.  Luckily, bread machines are great fo lazy people who don't want to do anything more elaborate than dumping ingredients in a metal bucket.  Plain bread is a bit boring though, so I needed to "spice" it up- literally.
          Recently on my weekly sunday grocery store trips (what is better than spending way too much money on food after you go run 14 miles?), I have been accruing various spices for our spice cabinet such as thyme, oregano, basil, etc. Other than rubbing the spices all over my chicken that I make, I hardly use them- therefore I decided to go with some whole wheat herb bread that I could put my spices to good use in.  The recipe I used was:


          1 1/4 cups warm water
          1 1/2 cup Bread flour
          1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
          1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
          2 tablespoons sugar
          2 tablespoons dry milk (aka the weirdest stuff ever)
          2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
          1 1/2 teaspoons salt
          1 1/2teaspoons dried basil leaves
          1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
          2 teaspoons bread machine or quick active dry yeast


1. put ingredients in bread machine- wet ingredients, followed by dry
2. put bread on basic cycle with light or medium crust
3. enjoy!



          Usually I am against using my bread machine in the place of Gertrude to actually bake the bread.  However, the idea of turning my bread machine on, leaving for a few hours for some errands and then returning to freshly baked bread sounded extremely appealing.  Even though the bread looked like a bread cube rather than a bread loaf and didn't rise quite right, the bread turned out warm, herby (don't ask if that is a word) and delicious.
          After I spent my usual 20 minutes or so trying to do my bread photographic justice, I decided I had done enough work for the day (making the bread was superrrr exhausting as you can see) and that I would upload and write the next day.   Well flash forward two days later, I finally got around to blogging and uploading.  Unfortunately, my procrastination backfired since my roommate (who recently started an awesome blog http://craftcoma.wordpress.com), thought I had already uploaded my pictures and erased them of her camera when she was taking awesome pictures of gluesticks for her crafty blog.  Luckily, I still had a few nubbins of my bread left in the freezer and was able to clean them up a bit to make them more presentable.  I also decided putting them into the toaster over with some  butter herb-garlic spread and  a sprinkle of mozzarella  cheese seemed like a good idea to make them look (and taste) much more food-blog-esque.


I just loaf bread so much!!

I hope this isn't too corny.....

I decided this weekend would be a good time to make another vegetable based baked good.  At first, I had settled with sweet potato bread- however, this entailed the use of my bread machine.  I have a theory that the arctic climate of my house is not conducive of happy yeast ( meaning my product would likely resemble a dense brick), so I decided to go with a quick bread that requires none of that rising nonsense. Though I'm pretty sure sweet potato quick bread does exist, I decided I may want to actually eat the sweet potatoes in non-bread form at some point this week, so I decided on corn bread.  Although there is much debate about whether corn is actually a vegetable, for the purposes of this blog (so I can continue this whole vegetable based baked products) CORN IS A VEGETABLE.

Every piece of cornbread/corn muffin I have ever had comes in one of two categories:

Type 1: The corn muffins at the Dining Commons is a quintessential example of this category of corn "bread"/"muffin".  These corn muffins tread the thin line between muffins (sounds healthy, right?) and cupcakes (not so healthy..duh).    Actually, I have always been a believer that there is actually not a thin line between muffins and cupcakes, but instead a big, fat, sketchy, undefined imaginary boundary that is easily up to the eater's discretion.  For instance, take a moist blue berry muffin complete with a sugary, buttery streusel topping.  Take note to the appropriate use of the word muffin.  However, take this same product and put frosting on it; Buh-Bam!! it is now a cupcake.  Therefore, streusel topping vs frosting is one characteristic that some (myself guilty) use to distinguish between the two words.
Time of day is another potential defining character; If it is morning, I would like to consider the product I am eating a muffin- because who eats cupcakes in the morning? But if I had that same product in the evening after dinner, I would like to consider it a cupcake- because who eats muffins for dessert? Thus, assuming that streusel topping and frosting are considered nutritionally equivalent, whether I call something a muffin or cupcake has nothing to do with its fat or sugar content, but instead, what type of sugary and fatty topping I have on it and/or what time of day I am eating it. One more potential distinguishing factor between muffins and cupcakes is the nature of the foods they accompany- which leads me back to the corn "muffins" at the DC.  The corn products are placed in a nice little bowl not by the dessert section, but by the chili.  This stealthy placement contributes to their perceived identity of muffins.    Have you ever heard of anyone dipping cupcakes in chili? I sure haven't.  People OBVIOUSLY dip corn muffins in chili.  Alas, even though these products are rich, sugary and moist- just like many cakes I enjoy-they are considered type I corn MUFFINS.

Type 2: Dry, crumbly and bland corn bread/muffins.  There is no cake/bread ambiguity with this type of corn BREAD.  Usually this type of bread needs copious amounts of honey, butter or chili to make it  moist enough to swallow. I'm not saying that this lack of cake-ness is necessarily a bad thing, because corn bread should be just that: corn bread.

So when I decided to make corn bread, I needed to decide on a "type" I was going to attempt.  I decided with type II, just because I wanted an actual bread product that I didn't feel guilty about consuming.  I was happy to know I had all the ingredients on hand except cornmeal.  There is a grocery store near me that has an awesome bulk section so if there is some obscure product you need, you can just get a small amount of it.  I'm not saying cornmeal is a super "obscure" ingredient, but I didn't feel like buying a whole box of it, so I decided to go to this store to buy my cornmeal.    When I was being rung up, I almost had a heart attack when the cashier told me the cost of my approximately one cup of cornmeal cost $8.25- had I accidentally picked up hand-ground organic cornmeal? No... apparently my handwriting on little white twisty ties sucks and they thought I was purchasing grade-B maple syrup.  Woops. I got that whole issue resolved quickly.   Anyways, the healthy recipe I used:


1 cup cornmeal
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
 1/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon salt
2 egg whites
1 cup skim milk
1/4 cup applesauce
Directions:

1.Mix dry ingredients.
2.Mix wet ingredients
3.Sift in dry into wet and mix until combined (I didn't have a sifter so I just used an egg beater!)
4.Bake for 400 degrees in a prepared 8x8 pan for 20 minutes
5. Serve with butter or honey and enjoy!

This bread has a surprisingly rich texture for something with applesauce and egg whites instead of oil and full eggs.  A little more sugar and it would be approaching type I cornbread status!! A little bit of honey on top is all it needed.    Anyways, I would say this was a fairly successful endeavor- maybe I should have bought more than 99 cents worth of cornmeal!

Cauliflower Cooking Catastrophe

Gertrude and I have been reunited... order is restored is the universe.  Unfortunately I had sort of a cooking fail today... andddd Gertrude had nothing to do with it.  Whose fault was it? This ones right here. 

I decided to stay true to my promise to transition to a more healthy food blog.  Sorry folks, there will be no more chocolate peanut butter deliciousness for quite a while. So, I decided to go pretty much all out on the health food scale- I made pizza! Healthiest food around.  Well, it is when you put cauliflower in it.  Actually, I did not just put cauliflower in it.  The crust is pretty made ENTIRELY of cauliflower.  Who needs flour when you have cauliFLOWER? My roommates were very skeptical of my escapades in the kitchen this evening, and they had every right to be.  I mean, pizza and cauliflower are two things that seemingly should never collide..... or should they?  Here is the first step of this whole dealio.

Yum... rice, right? Guess again.  This is cauliflower... very deceptive ninja cauliflower that doesn't even look like cauliflower. I honestly must say I have never bought cauliflower until today... not exactly one of my top foods.  However, I quickly became acquainted with this majestic vegetable and  I somehow managed to chop it up a bit and throw it in my little food processor to make this cauliflower rice. Anyways, you need a full head of cauliflower to make about two cups of "rice".  

Here is where I made my fatal mistake (that didn't actually turn out to be that fatal, but I'm trying to make this dramatic).  I was just so excited how "rice-like" this looked that I jumped the gun and quickly added my 1 egg, 1 cup low-moisture mozzarella cheese,  2 clove garlic, 1 tsp of basil,  and 1 tsp of oregano to make the pizza "dough".  But oh wait... I completely forgot I was supposed to cook the cauliflower for eight minutes in the microwave BEFORE I mixed everything up.  So, I basically have this raw cauliflower goop instead of cooked cauliflower goop.  What do I do? Well, the only logical thing to do would be to put it in the microwave for 8 minutes, just like the recipe said. So I hesitantly start it in the microwave, just waiting for it to go up in smoke and flames.  The suspense was killing me as I waited 8 long minutes... I distracted myself by trying to buy a textbook online, which actually worked since I spent about 5 minutes trying to access the $90 e-book I had just purchased.  Anyways, when 8 minutes was up, I nervously took the bowl out... and it looked pretty much exactly the same as it did before.  I took that as a good sign.  Proceed as normal. The next step was to shape the dough.  I was still feeling a bit pessimistic about my major blunder, so I decided not to put much effort into making a perfect circle and decided to go with the whole "rough around the edges look"..... literally. 

Even though Gertrude was not exactly preheated yet, I was getting a bit antsy to get this show on the road so I just put it in the oven.  I did make a miraculous discovery that led to a major breakthrough in Gertrude and my relationship.  If I put my food on parchment paper, Gertrude will just burn the parchment paper and not my actually food item (or, not so much at least).  I'm glad to know that Gertrude can selectively channel her anger towards unimportant accessories in baking process.  So, after baking the crust for thirty minutes I was happy to see the very edges nice and brown... and nothing more than brown.  Now it was time to put stuff on the pizza.  

The first step was to spread my delicious pesto sauce on the crust.  On new years eve I went out for italian food and I really wanted some pesto on my calzone.... so, I ordered a side of pesto.  Let me repeat, a SIDE of pesto.  Did they give me a SIDE of pesto?? Oh no, I got a whole nice soup bowl full of pesto.  But hey, for $3.50, I am not complaining... I love pesto! It is the best-o!  So I spread my pesto on my pizza, followed by a sprinkle a cheese (a sprinkle opposed to a handfull since the crust already had cheese in it).  Next I grilled up some chicken with the latest member of my kitchen appliances.. my indoor grill.  I lightly marinated the chicken for about 1 hr before hand in italian dressing and it turned out fairly delicious.  I chopped it up, put some on the pizza, along with some cherry tomatos I halved.  I put the whole pie back in the oven, and let it cook for about five more minutes. The toppings were definitely a bit too heavy for the pizza, but that did not stop me from enjoying half of the pizza (its healthy, remember!).  And the crust was actually pretty good.  If someone told me that the crust was thin crust pizza, a might... let my repeat, MIGHT, believe them. Anyways, I was very happy with the result, despite by major screw-up.  Therefore, I am sort of tempted to try this the right way.  Later though.  I don't know how much cauliflower I feel like scraping off my food processor in a week.  So, until next time... next week I will choose a new vegetable to make into one of america's favorites.... or maybe I will just stick with cauliflower.  Cauliflower cookies? I think yes. 

Gifty Granola

          For the last 5 years for Christmas, I have given my relatives cookie mix in a jar (basically a jar with layers of flour, sugar, chocolate chips, m and ms, cranberries, nuts, rice crispies, oats, etc that the lucky recipient can whip out wonderful cookies by just adding eggs and butter).  However, unlike previous years when I have had two whole weeks after finishing finals until Christmas, this week I only had ONE week, so I for some reason felt like I did not have in my oh-so-busy schedule to spend two hours making cookie jars. So I decided I should do something else instead.

           Since I have the artistic talent of a first grader, I decided I needed to stick with food.  Everyone likes food, right? I also really couldn't abandon the whole jar idea (not like having to stick with the jar idea really limited my options since we all know that ANYTHING can be eaten out of a jar).  I should also note that  I'm trying to slowly make this blog transition from its current state (Peanut Butter crunch bites, Oreo truffle filled cupcakes, pumpkin pie bars, etc) to its original state (HEALTHY whole wheat pumpkin muffins and HEALTHY squash mac and cheese).  I don't want to make that transition cold turkey though, so I decided to go with one of the foods that commonly straddles the line between health food and not health food: granola!

            Luckily, I am at my family home right now so Gertrude did not have to be involved with this project that has a lot of burn potential.  I just realized that is two weeks in a row without Gertrude, but I think this is a well needed break between us- distance makes the heart grow fonder. Anyways, the oven at my family home is pretty solid- it is definitely a plus that it can fit two baking sheets on a rack (Gertrude of course can fit exactly 1.8 sheets in her until she refuses to close- I guess she just insists we leave her on for hours at a time while making cookies). For that reason, I'm glad this other oven...let's call him..... Steve.... can fit multiple sheets, because this project literally would have taken exactly 15 hours in Gertrude.  I am not kidding.

For this project, I used the recipe:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/granola-recipe/index.html

             I followed it exactly as listed- I even bought good maple syrup instead of using the maple syrup in my fridge that was really just high fructose corn syrup dyed brown with a truckload of vanilla flavoring dumped in.  I had a temporary crisis when I realized the cashews I bought were salted.  I put them in a colander and washed the salt away.  Crisis averted.

            The whole baking process was quite intensive .  Granola is very susceptible to burning, so I had to stir the granola every fifteen minutes to prevent some parts from turning to ash.  However, my intensive TLC to the granola was worth it, since I only burned 1 out of 6 batches.. not too shabby. After it baked and cooled for a while, I jarred it up in some 1 quart jars.

           Looks a little bit boring, huh? These were a bit bland looking (not tasting, luckily!), so I needed to somehow jazz them up.  If I had time and motivation, I would whip out my hot glue gun and fabric scraps and make nice little fabric skirts on the lids.  However, I had about 15 minutes total to finish this last part of the project so I needed something simple.  My conclusion? shove paper bags in the printer to make labels to give the "rustic look".  Even though the sounds the printer was making as the labels were made were really troublesome, I was quite happy with my quick fix. Here are the the final results!