another adventure in baking! :)

so there will be pictures posted soon of the finished product for the apple cup pies (or as my friend, Beth, accidentally typed one day: cuppies!).

Last night, after searching Target for a candy thermometer and only finding a bulky one that's also for frying things, and buying 3 lbs. of Hershey's chocolate from Costco, I went home and made - drum roll goes here - the Hann Family Christmas thing which I will be giving as presents to friends and co-workers (so if you fall into one of those groups and don't want to know, stop reading! ;-) no seriously stop now if you don't want to know because if you read any further any surprise may be ruined and well, I warned you)............more continued drum roll-ing.....................................English Toffee! yay! :D This is my first year making it, and so far it's turning out just fine! Of course I've been around for the making of it for years and years and years and years, and I may have helped stir the melting chocolate before, but this is the first time I'm making it all on my own. It was kinda scary last night, too; trying to not burn the butter/sugar concoction beyond recognition, but also trying to get it to the correct temperature, all the while trying to keep my apartments smoke detector from going off, oh and watching Planet of the Dead (one of the special episodes of Doctor Who that came out this last year) and of course my pot of butter/sugar to be toffee was smoking the most during the most intense moments of the show giving me appropriately epic music!

I have one batch made - nearly- (this is the batch for all those folks I know who are allergic to nuts as it's just going to be chocolate and toffee) as it has one side covered in chocolate and tonight I'll be flipping it over to cover the other side with chocolate. So there ya go. I'll have to take some pictures to show all of you what it looks like!

another baking adventure!

Tonight was my only really free night this week as tomorrow I'm fortunate enough to get to go with my roommate to the Disneyland Cast Member Christmas Party, Wednesday night is, of course, the musical discussion group, and Thursday night is lifegroup. You're probably saying: ok, Janelle but there's still Friday night! and you'd be right if not for the facts that: a. I'm flying home on Friday night to go visit mom and dad; and b. what I needed a free night for was for the pie I'm supposed to bring to the Registrar's Office Annual Christmas Party happening on Friday! So tonight I decided I'd get things prepared!

<- these 5.5 filled cupcake molds make up the last 5.5 of 17.5 of the now-ready-to-be-filled crust I made tonight. Unfortunately (mostly because my hands were covered in flour) I didn't take pictures of the dough making or rolling out step in the process. However I have high hopes for the results of this crust as it had one of the best textures of unbaked crust I've made yet! So here's hoping! Another quick "unfortunately": unfortunately, as you can see, I didn't have quite enough dough to go around and it takes such a long time rolling out the mini-crusts to go into the cup-cake pans that by the time I realized this, it was too late for me to make more. Fortunately, someone else is also bringing pie to the Christmas party, so it's not just up to me. But I feel kinda bad because cup-pies are individual sorts of things and if I don't have enough then there will be people who miss out! Maybe I'll have to find some time to make enough more crust to fill the remaining 6.5 cup-cake molds as well as make tops for the whole lot of 'em. Ok, well onto the next part: filling.

<- I don't know if you can see her there, but right behind the apple on that marvelously torturous-looking device is my fellow baker and roommate, Laura. Tonight she was busy making gingerbread while I was working away on my apples! Ok, back to the subject. The apples. Thanks to a co-worker's generous sister I was able to borrow an apple corer, peeler, slicer and I really thing I should feel guilty for how easy it made the project. Fortunately I only feel like I should feel guilty as I had enough other things to get done there isn't much guilt slipping through. But as you can see in the photo it rather perfectly peels the apple and turns it into a happy little apple slinky! Since I'm making cup-pies I went from there and cut most of the apples into quarters, a few into eighths, so that the filling would fit into each little pie.

This is a picture of the filling in action! Just in between adding the tablespoon of flour and putting in the cinnamon! Mmmmmm! Hopefully it will taste just as good as it looks!

There's a lot involved in the beautiful process that is baking and I found out tonight that one of those things is being good at arranging spaces! The nice thing is that I have all of this done. The hard part is that now I have to wait until Thursday night to put it together and bake it. So, right now I made some interesting choices and re-arranged a whole 2 shelves in the refrigerator just to make room for the pie crusts in their cup-pie pans and the filling (which has been safely stowed in a nice little Tupperware container). I'll let you know how things go! Oh, and I need to remember to go buy the Gruyère! I intend to make these cup-pies worth of the "Pie Hole" and Charlotte Charles of Pushing Daisies! :-D. I'll leave you with that until the conclusion of this story. Until then,

Linus.

the finished product!

That, my friends, is a chocolate-earl grey cake! And it tastes amazing! Not only did it turn out wonderfully, it also was a blast to make!

I picked this recipe because it sounded like something I'd love. It's chocolate and it's tea! How can you go wrong?

The morning in question, after I signed off of the computer, I walked to my nearby Henry's Market (which is amazing) and purchased those ingredients we didn't have at home. When I got back to my apartment I began to preheat the oven and steep the tea and I was about to start melting the chocolate when I realized that although any of our pots would have worked it would be best in a double boiler. Alas, I do not have one, so I ran out to my car and zipped over to Target. From there, while standing in the aisle with a double boiler in one hand and a pyrex bowl in the other I call my mom - that source of amazing cooking wisdom - to ask her opinion on melting chocolate. With years of making English Toffee for Christmas she knows a thing or two about melting chocolate. However she informs me that she recently found out from one of San Francisco's best pastry chefs that the way to melt chocolate is in the microwave. So I go with the pyrex bowl and return home!

Upon returning home, I decide that having White Christmas on in the background would only make my cake that much better. So after hitting play, I start melting the chocolate in 10sec intervals in the microwave...for the most part everything went well. Thanks to Becky who purchased an electric hand mixer for the apartment last month I was able to get everything mixed well. When everything was mixed together, however the directions said to pour the batter into the pan...and well the batter didn't seem like it would easily pour. In fact it felt more like a mousse in texture than cake batter. The airy but slightly stiff mixture. But I spooned it into the pan and set it to bake for the requisite 50min after double and triple checking that I'd added every ingredient and not too much of one thing or another. After cleaning all of my utensils and dishes and counters, I decided that a cake like this, despite the recipe calling for just a dusting of powdered sugar, deserved a well thought out topping. So I found a recipe for a browned butter frosting and worked on that! Mmmmm! Once the cake was done, I let it cool a little while and then lightly poured the frosting on top and then I melted more chocolate to drizzle over that! It has been amazing!

The flavors within one bite are many and amazing. It's moist and although you'd expect the chocolate to be strong it's nicely soft with the earl grey notes playing throughout! And then with the almost toffee-ish flavored frosting and dark chocolate on top it's one fun mix of flavors! I wish I could send you a slice so you could try it yourself! In lieu of that I'll just post another picture.

Inspiration?

I just watched Julie & Julia tonight! It was so fun! And now I want to cook, blog, write...go to France (oh wait, I've wanted to do that for a very long time). My mom had been bugging me to see it for a while, and so Hannah and I decided that when it got the dollar theater we'd go see it together. So tonight we finally did. It made me miss Caitlin who's in Paris right now. It made me want to be more adventurous with my cooking. And it reminded me to come back to my blog. I want to get better about remembering to post on here. Anything, everything. Maybe I'll start cooking and blogging like Julie...Or at least I can plan to do so this month!

For today (because I finished writing this blog post at a different juncture - Nov. 28th) I intend to try my hand at cake! And not just any cake! I'm using a recipe I found on Real Simple's website (I love that magazine) for Chocolate-Early Grey Cake. Sounds interesting, huh? I thought so, too! Ok, well now I'm off to buy the ingredients I don't have! Have a wonderful day and I'll tell you how it went when it's done!

NaNoWriMo

I'm doing it. I'm writing something for NaNoWriMo. I don't know what will happen or how it will end, however, I'm writing. And that's the whole point. By the end I probably won't have more than a page of good story with the rest of it being worthless drivel, but I'm writing. :) Just thought I'd let you know! I'm not yet to 3,000 words, and by today I should have closer to 10,000...alas, I'll hopefully have time to get caught up over the weekend.

hahahaha funny, but probably true

http://mrtea.wordpress.com/2009/10/19/mr-tea-episode-18-all-you-need-to-know-about-tea-to-get-girls/

2,000 words a day

That's what I need to do everyday from November 1st to November 30th with maybe a day off here or there...if I want to make it to (and perhaps a bit past) the 50,000 word count for NaNoWriMo! This is gonna be exciting! :-D We'll see what happens.