Friday Baking Backlog

I'm so lazy with blogging and downloading photos these days, so here's several weeks worth of baking....

Several weeks ago, Nigel and I made chocolate mousse from one of our standard kids' cookbooks. We beat 2 cups of heavy cream, melted 1 1/4 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips, and combined the cream and chocolate. The picture in the book showed the mousse in small coffee cups, so we put ours into our tiny ones from Ethiopia.

Speaking of Ethiopia, that same week I made Ethiopian black-eyed pea cakes from a kids' ethnic vegetarian cookbook. It was so simple:

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups dried black-eyed peas
1 sweet potato
1 onion, diced
small chili (optional; I used 1/2 of a seeded jalapeno)

Directions
Soak peas over night in water, covered. Drain away water and rub peas between your hands to loosen the skins. Cover the peas with water again and drain away the water and skins. Peel the sweet potato, cut it into pieces and boil until tender. Add the onion to a food processor and pulse. Do the same with the potato, peas and chili. (I had to do this in batches because it seems like my food processor was too small.) Flour a work surface. Make flat patties using 2 tablespoons of the bean mixture. Place the patties onto the floured surface (I turned them over once so each side would have flour). Fry in olive oil (I added a small bit of butter, too) until brown and flip to brown the other side. Eat immediately.

Conclusion
These cakes are pretty much bean burgers, sans bread or any other binder. Next time I'll add some salt, though. Tim suggested that they could be a good sandwich base... perhaps with bacon and avocado.

The following week, Nigel and I made Jello shapes. Or at least we attempted to. Being the non-baking person I am, I halved the mixture between 2 shallow dishes, making the Jello too thin for cookie cutters. No worries, though. Nigel still enjoyed stirring up the mixture and eating the jiggly goo.

The week after that, our dear friend Amy invited us over to make Halloween cookies with her son, James. The boys rolled out the dough, cut out the shapes and decorated the cookies. Yummy fun!

And finally, this week, Nigel and I made a lemon cake for Tim. My mom makes super delicious tiny lemon cakes during the holidays, so this was my lazy attempt to duplicate. Instead of lots of tiny cakes, Nigel and I made one loaf-shaped cake. Next, we created a glaze from powdered sugar, lemon juice and orange juice. Nigel liked rolling the lemons on the counter before I squeezed the juice.

What have you been baking?

Friday Cooking: Chocolate Fudge Cake

When the librarian showed me where the kids' cookbooks are, she had no idea she was creating an obsessive monster! This week we picked out four cookbooks: two about healthy snacks and meals, one with ethnic vegetarian dishes, and one that talks about how chocolate comes about. This week's recipe comes from Mom and Me Cookbook: Have fun in the kitchen by Annabel Karmel. I got this book because we own a baby cookbook by the author; it was really helpful when I made Nigel's baby food and wasn't sure about quantities, safety, etc.

Nigel chose this recipe from all of those books. I even brought out the books we own to try and sway him to something else. No dice. Thus, Chocolate Fudge Cake was born. While the recipes in this book aren't as healthy as her baby cookbook, the directions were simple and Nigel could follow along with the pictures. He really enjoyed beating the graham crackers with his mini rolling pin and dumping all of the ingredients into the bowl. The "cake" is a little more sticky than I thought it'd be, (I guess the syrup keeps it from turning into a block.) but it was still pretty tasty. It kind of reminded me of the Sweet Dream Pie.

Ingredients
8oz graham crackers
5oz semisweet chocolate (we used dark)
5oz milk chocolate
1/2 cup golden syrup or light corn syrup
1 stick of butter
1/2 cup raisins (we used dried cranberries and dried cherries)
3/4 chopped dried apricots

Directions
Line an 8-inch square pan with plastic wrap. Break the graham crackers into small pieces. Melt the chocolate, butter and syrup in a double boiler. Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in the crackers and fruit. Spoon the mixture in the pan and press down. Cool for 1-2 hours and cut.

Friday Cooking: Cereal Bars

How many people does it take to make cereal bars? Three! One to dump in the dry ingredients (6 cups of cereal, 1/2 cup of dried cranberries and a few chocolate chips); one to melt the 3 tablespoons of butter and a bag of mini marshmallows ... and wash the pot of melted marshmallows; and one to put some muscle into stirring the super sticky mess and spread it into a pan. For such a simple recipe (from the library book Peanut Butter and Jelly Sushi ), these bars were a bit of a pain. And ours certainly don't look like the neat pressed bars in the book. The sticky cereal kept sticking to the spoon. I guess some cooking spray would have helped with that, but I don't use that stuff so we don't have any. Oh well, Nigel enjoyed picking out the different types of cereal (Grape Nuts, wheat chex, Cheerios and blueberry Kashi flakes) and watching the marshmallows melt.

Friday Cooking: Pudding & Cheesecake

You guys, you can't get much easier than last Friday's cooking projects: instant chocolate pudding and a low-carb, low-sugar cheesecake (I'm in training mode again). Nigel dumped in the pudding mix and milk; as you can see, he enjoyed mixing it all together.

The cheesecake was fat-free, sugar-free lemon Jello, hot water and 2 packages of low-fat cream cheese. It tasted a lot like it sounds: dull and kind of gross.

We'll be back with something more inventive this Friday. My pal Amy suggested some cookbooks, so we picked up a few at the library this week, including Pretend Soup. The book looks really cute and simple. There are directions for the parents alongside step-by-step picture instructions for the kiddos. Stay tuned!

Friday Cooking: Cookies

We had some Internet issues last week and this weekend, so Friday Cooking is a few days late. I know you were holding your breath to see what we'd make. This was another pretty simple week here. We made basic chocolate chip cookies and added dried cherries. Nigel got to dump in the ingredients, mix and sample some chocolate chips. The cookies were really good, but I need to research some recipes that would allow him to be more hands-on. Any suggestions?

Friday Cooking: Fruit Pies

This week's cooking experiment was pretty uneventful. I had some leftover pie crust and fruit, so I thought we could make mini fruit pies. Nigel chose pears and peaches for the filling. I diced the fruit and sauteed it in some butter and brown sugar. Nigel helped roll out the pie crust and make circles with cookie cutters. Then I put some fruit on a circle and topped it with another circle. I had hoped to ice the tops of the pies with and icing made of powdered sugar and the juices from the fruit, but I didn't have enough powdered sugar on hand so it was too runny to use. The pies were very dry; I couldn't figure out how to keep juices inside the crust without it running out. Maybe I needed a cornstarch thickener? Cookies are up this Friday, so there will be lots for Nigel to do!

Friday Cooking: Cupcake Cones

This week we borrowed an idea from our trusty kid's cook book, but cheated a tad. Nigel drooled over the cupcake ice cream cones when we first explored the book last week, so we gave it a shot. We used a box mix and canned icing, so unfortunately, Nigel didn't get to do a ton this week. He dumped in all of the ingredients, helped stir (after flicking a bunch of cake mix onto the floor), iced the cooled cones and added the sprinkles. I was worried about the cones falling over in the oven, but they were quite sturdy. The cake mix made way more than the book called for, so we made 10 cones and put the remaining batter into a loaf pan (once the loaf was cool I cut it into little sticks and froze them for Nigel's lunches). Unfortunately, less than 7 hours after we made them, the cones have already gotten a little soggy; Tim said it tastes like chewing on stale bread.

Friday Cooking: Blueberry Muffins

Friday cooking time here. We're due a trip to the grocery store tomorrow, so we had to choose a recipe based on our existing ingredients. After consulting our recipe box and three kid cookbooks, Nigel chose Blueberry Muffins (recipe below) from the The Kid's Cookbook by Williams-Sonoma; I actually purchased the book back in the late 1990s when I worked at Time Life.

Nigel helped measure and dump the flour, baking powder and milk; stir the ingredients; line the cupcake tin with paper liners; and add the blueberries. There was also a good teachable cooking moment — and an example of why baking and I don't mix: We reread the ingredients before we scooped out the muffins and realized we'd forgotten to add the sugar!

Blueberry Muffins

Ingredients
1/2 cup melted butter
2 cups flour (we used 1 cup of whole wheat and 1 cup of all-purpose)
1/2 cup sugar
1 T baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 cup milk
1 egg
3/4 t vanilla
1 cup blueberries (we were a little shy of a cup, so we defrosted some frozen strawberries and tossed those in, too)

Directions
Preheat oven to 375. In a medium bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In a small bowl, combine milk, beaten egg and vanilla. Add the milk mixture and the melted butter to the dry ingredients; combine and add blueberries. Spoon mixture into 12 muffin liners. Bake for 18 to 20 minutes.

Friday Cooking: Sweet Dream Pie

As much as we're all ready for Nigel to start preschool in a few weeks, I am kind of sad that we won't have as much time together. So, I thought it'd be fun to do something special together on the days that he's home. Enter: Friday Cooking. I LOVE to cook, but I hate to bake. Even if I'm following a recipe I usually mess something up and end up disappointed. So, this project will also hopefully get my over my fear of the exact, measured kind of cooking baking requires. Nigel loves to help in the kitchen and eat the results, so it's a win-win.

Last week we enjoyed the book Sweet Dream Pie from the library. In the story, an older couple mixes up an amazing sugary pie with gumdrops, cookies, candy canes, etc. The pie's supposed to make you have sweet dreams, but everyone who ate it ate too much and ended up having wild dreams and a restless sleep.

There's no way I was going to let Nigel eat a pie with all of those things inside, so we dug through my recipe box and he chose a Chocolate-Nut Tart with Dried Fruit recipe that I'd clipped from Gourmet (the recipe's below). It was pretty easy, although next time I'll steer him toward a recipe that he can do more with (read: one that doesn't having scalding hot cream and involve lots of knife work). Nigel pricked the pie crust, measured out the dried fruit and nuts, spread the jelly, dumped the cold cream into the pan before I heated it up, etc. What does it taste like? The pie is VERY rich, and it reminds me of my beloved Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut Bar. If you're fortunate to live in a not so hot place, you might be able to leave the pie out on the counter. We're not that fortunate, so I had to store it in the fridge and then let it soften slightly on the counter.

Chocolate-Nut Tart with Dried Fruit
1 refrigerated pie crust (1/2 of a 15-oz package)
1/4 cup raspberry preserves
1/2 cup whipping cream
12 oz bittersweet chocolate
1 cup assorted nuts (we used pecans because they're soft and hazelnuts because they're relatively easy to chop)
1 cup assorted dry fruit (we used pineapple, golden raisins and razzcherries)
pinch of salt
1/3 cup toffee bits for garnish (we didn't do this)

Preheat oven to 450. Press pie crust into bottom and up sides of 10-inch tart pan with removable bottom (we don't have this kind of pan because, again, I don't bake, so I used a normal pie pan); trim edges and prick crust with a fork. Bake for about 12 minutes. Cool. Spread preserves over the bottom of the crust.
Bring cream to a simmer in a heavy saucepan. Reduce to low and add chocolate until melted and smooth. Remove from heat; stir in nuts, fruit and salt. Spread chocolate mixture in crust. Sprinkle toffee bits on top. Chill until set. (I let it cool on the counter for a bit and then some in the fridge before I covered it with plastic wrap). Serve cold or at room temperature.