Tournament Weekend with Gertrude

For this three day weekend during which I fairly minimal necessary school work, I decided to experiment quite a bit in the kitchen.  My efforts yielded a wide variety of results. I had a loss, a draw, a win and one that is still TBA. In order to end this post on a positive note,  I will start with my loss: cookies.  

I must admit, I have never actually made cookies in Gertrude before. I have observed during my roommates' cookie-making experiences that cookies bring out the worst side of Gertrude.  She feels the need to cook the heck out of the bottom of the cookies and just channels so much of her energy there, that she forgets about the other 2/3 of the cookie (ie, the inside that needs to be baked).  Nevertheless, I though Gertrude would behave for me, since we have such a special bond.  

I excitedly whipped up http://allrecipes.com/recipe/oatmeal-butterscotch-cookies/ with some added walnuts that I decided would make a nice touch.  I didn't grease the pan, just like the instructions said, and I put them in the oven.  The recipe said it would take 8-10 minutes to cook.  However, just THREE minutes in, I sensed an unpleasant smell coming from Gertrude.  The bottoms were completely brown and the tops were still mush! Not cool Gertrude.  YOU HAVE ONE JOB!!!  

Anyways, in case you were wondering, the dough tasted wonderful.  So this is definitely a recipe I

need to try again..... perhaps in a different oven.  

On the same topic of second tries, I decided to retry the whole cauliflower pizza thing (remember http://cookingwithgertrude.blogspot.com/2013/01/cauliflower-cooking-catastrophe.html) .  I used the same recipe http://www.theluckypennyblog.com/2013/02/the-best-cauliflower-crust-pizza.html.  Sparknotes of my "Cauliflower Cooking Catastrophe Post": I accidentally mixed the cheese and egg with the cauliflower before microwaving the cauliflower for 4 minutes.  Whoops.  This time around, I did everything exactly as the recipe said.... except I baked the crust on tin foil instead of parchment paper. No big deal, right? I didn't think so. Well, I excitedly loaded up the pizza with sauce, mozzarella, chicken, broccoli, garlic, spinach.... basically the whole nine yards.  I baked it as the instructions said and took it out of the oven. Looks sort of like a pizza: 

  Then I tried to cut it....... The tin foil was a bad choice.  Gertrude thought it would be nice to fuse together the crust and the foil.  So basically, cutting this pizza made it so it was not a pizza anymore.  I am going to call this "cauliflower casserole" instead of cauliflower pizza.... it's a unique "cooking with Gertrude" creation: 

It actually tasted delicious too.  Nevertheless, I decided this was my tie with Gertrude. She didn't quite cooperate but I have able to salvage a delicious product. 

Onto the win: whenever I am on pinterest, I spend the majority of my time on one of three boards: "humor"(who doesn't like Internet memes), "food and drink" (duh) and "health and fitness" (I guess, duh).  The "food and drink" recipes are usually pretty outrageously delicious, but not the most healthy.... okay let's be honest... most of the time they are outrageously unhealthy.  Therefore, I try to spend some time on the "health and fitness" board because it usually has some more healthy recipes .  One of pins I would commonly see was that for spaghetti squash recipes. I love squash, and I love spaghetti, so I was fairly intrigued by the idea that this squash could closely mimic pasta and decided to give it a shot. 

 First, I had to roast the spaghetti squash.  This means I basically stabbed the squash like crazy with a knife and put it in the oven for 80 minuetes at 375 degrees.   I was a bit worried after four minutes when I heard weird noises coming from the oven, but the squash ended up turning out perfectly and it was fairly easy to scoop the "spaghetti" out of it once I let it cool .  I used the following recipe: http://www.marthastewart.com/873339/roasted-squash-parmesan-and-herbs.  Did it taste like spaghetti? Not at all.  However, it was still delicious because it tasted like thanksgiving stuffing, which is always a win.  I also whipped up some roasted green beans/sweet potatoes/asparagus medley, which complemented it quite well. 

And finally, my baking project that is still up in the air.  Apparently, this breadmaking method yields some amazing bread with various complex flavors.  I honestly don't know how complex of a flavor bread can possibly have, so I was very intrigued.  I will talk more about this in future blog posts, but here is the recipe I am following http://www.marthastewart.com/907240/chad-robertsons-tartine-country-bread.  It requires a starter that takes about three weeks to make, so the making of this bread is a fairly large commitment.  The ending bread just looks so good though, so I am hoping it is worth the effort and that Gertrude does not mess everything up.  Anyways,  the first step is to mix flour and water and wait two days for bubbles to form. YUMMMMMMM.... If you don't believe me that this bread is going to be delicious, watch this video: http://vimeo.com/14354661

Not-so-special (albeit delicious) brownies

This past Saturday, my household posted a BBQ.  Every time there is even a semblance of an excuse for me to make something delicious, I will.  I originally had settled on making ice cream with the ice cream machine  I remembered I had....yes, another unnecessary kitchen appliance.  Unfortunately, I forgot to put the ice cream canister thing in the freezer until the day I needed it.  The instructions said freezing the canister could take anywhere from 6-24 hours so needless to say, I was hoping for six.  I soon found out though that my  freezer is Gertrude's cold0blooded brother.... we will call him Brutus.  Basically Brutus is just as unreliable and angsty as Gertrude is, and because I have not yet fostered a  close, understanding relationship with Brutus as I have with Getrude, he was not playing nice.  Long story short, my ice cream was more like a milk shake.... if that.  It was very disappointing. I even tried it again the next day after the can had frozen for a good 20 hours, and that still did not work! I guess the instructions manual was not kidding when it says it can take up to 24 hours to freeze.

Luckily, I had decided on saturday before the ice cream fail that I would make some small treat to accompany the ice cream.  Well, that obviously turned out to be the main treat, but luckily these brownies were pretty darn good.  I cut straight to the chase when finding a recipe by googling "best brownies" and I came up with this recipe:
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/best-brownies/

I rarely make JUST brownies (usually they are accompanied by some cookie dough and/or caramel and/or peanutbutter magical goodness), but since I was supposed to have ice cream with them, I decided to go with old fashioned brownies.  I should have doubled the batch, because they turned out wonderful; fudgy and chewy... just as brownies should be!

When life hands you lemons....

 If someone were to just peruse my blog for even one minute, one thing that would be fairly obvious is my stance on chocolate.... I love chocolate.  Therefore, the bulk of my recipes revolve around chocolate.  However, in order to expand my baking abilities and possibly gain some followers who *gasp* don't like chocolate, I decided to branch out a bit and try making a fruit dessert.  In the spirit of mother's day, I decided to make some lemon cupcakes for my wonderful mother who may be one of those people who isn't as obsessed with chocolate as I am.  I have to admit, I was a bit nervous.  I rarely make fruit-based desserts, let alone make fruit-based in Gertrude, so I was really hoping that the stars would align to allow me to perfect a slightly ambitious recipe of lemon-curd- filled lemon cupcakes with lemon buttercream.... wow, that is a lot of lemon!!

Usually when I bake super ambitious desserts, I use my parents' kitchen due to the presence of a reliable oven and more importantly, a kitchen-aid.  I have already decided that the first kitchen item I will buy when I am no longer a starving student (well, not exactly starving) is a kitchen-aid.  Those things are amazing for ambitious, yet slightly lazy bakers like myself.  Anyways, because I was going to surprise my mom, I decided I should just do this whole production in my little kitchen with Gertrude and my $20 hand mixer that doesn't even have all the right metal attachments.

I used this recipe:

http://oishiitreats.blogspot.com/2013/04/so-me-your-pucker-face-lemon-curd_16.html

I didn't feel like having three windows open and this recipe covered everything (cupcakes, lemon curd filling and frosting.)

step 1: cake.  Mixing it up was simple enough.  I highly recommend that anytime a recipe calls for cake flour, use it! It makes a world of a difference in cakes/cupcakes... it is called CAKE flour after all.  Likewise, I have mentioned this before, but always use unsalted butter in recipes.  The amount of salt in different butters is variable, so don't just take the salt out of the recipe and use salted butter.  Anyways, Gertrude was on pretty good behavior.  The edges were slightly brown, but not too bad.  I figured the slightly browned edges were just an excuse to put more frosting the cupcakes.

step 2: Lemon curd.  This was the step that would make or break me.  You can look at the posted recipe for more specifics, but in short, the idea with lemon curd is to heat up butter, eggs, lemon juice and sugar.  I have a bit of lets call it eggsxiety... meaning I get a bit anxious when heating up eggs in any custard/curd-like product since I always seem to get the eggs too hot..... which means they scramble.... which means I usually have to filter out scrambled eggs out of my product.... not cool. The recipe was very specific about not letting the mixture boil, so I literally sat there for about 10 minutes stirring this mixture as fast as I possibly good to prevent any boiling.  When it started to boil even with my stirring, I decided to take it off the heat, even though it wasn't exactly that thick yet.  Regardless, I followed the instructions and put it in the fridge.  Usually, I would be very impatient and try to prematurely fill the cupcakes, but I decided to be a mature adult and let the lemon curd sit in the fridge for a while.  When I came back, the slightly grossish looking curd had turned into a magical bowl of lemony goodness... patience is a virtue.   I proceeded to use a teaspoon to make little holes in the tops of my cupcakes and fill them up.

step 3: frosting.  This is the part I was least worried about, yet it caused me the most problems.  I followed the recipe exactly, but after two batches of cupcakes in gertrude on a 90 degrees day, my kitchen was slightly on the warmer side.  Therefore, my frosting was not quite the consistency I was hoping for... a little soupy.  I still decided to load up my dessert decorator pro (aka the best 10 dollars I have even spent in my life) with this liquidy frosting.  The frosting sort of lost its form after I put in on each cupcake... not exactly what I was going for... But no one has to know that! They ended up looking decent after they firmed up in the fridge for a bit.

Most importantly, the cupcakes were absolutely delicious.  Fruity dessert win.  My mom loved them, which was obviously my ultimate goal.  Anyways, here were the final products!! So in conclusion... when life hands you lemons, make lemon cupcakes!

Balanced Meals FTW

It's pretty sad that I have almost updated this blog more times in the last 3 days than I have in the last 3 months.  To make up for that, I decided to show TWO of the wonderful creations I whipped together in my kitchen tonight.  I'll start with dinner.  This was actually a pretty typical dinner for me , but I really am just having too much fun with the retina display on my new iphone camera so I decided to take one of those "oh look at me I eat super healthy" pictures.

In this lovely salad, we have:
1)organic baby spinach (which is delicious.. after I wash the lady bugs out!)
2) green beans and asparagus that I tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper and minced garlic and baked for 15 min at 425 degrees
3) battered wild alaskan salmon (I admit, all I had to do was take this out of the box and bake it)
4) a crumble of feta cheese
5) dried cranberries
6) corn that I heated up in the microwave and tossed with salt and pepper
7) My "lite cranberry walnut vinaigrette" that I would love to say I made, but actually just got from a bottle.

So that was dinner... full of healthy omega three fatty acids and leafy greens.  But it looks like I am lacking some carbs, right? I thought so.  The solution???? THIS:

I followed the recipe pretty much word for word, except the store did not have any big peanut butter cups so I just used mini dark chocolate ones.   The bars are sitting nicely in my fridge right now and it's basically taking every bit of self-control I have to not go and eat every single one..... Hence I am writing about them.    Think delicious combination of peanut butter cookie and fudge.  And they are practically healthy.... they have two cups of oatmeal!! Nothing like Peanut Butter Dream Bars to round off a healthy meal.

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!!