Month: October 2010

S’mores Cake

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

As far as desserts go, I’m pretty sure this cake represents me completing a s’mores hat trick.  Earlier this week I was feeling a little glum; I had so much school work to do, I hadn’t been home except to sleep for a few days straight and I was just overly frustrated at the lack of blogging and delicious food eating I had been doing lately.  In true Hilary fashion I went upstairs, turned on some Taylor Swift and started singing at the top of my lungs.  The combination of baking and singing (poorly) were the only two things that could cure my slump.

I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to make when I first went upstairs, however I very quickly decided that s’more-ing it up was the absolute only thing to do.  I originally wanted to have chocolate cookie crumbs on the bottom of the dessert with a graham cracker cake on top of that, but I was faced with an obstacle of terrible proportions.  Did you know that chocolate crumbs go bad?  Me neither, but for some reason these smelled really sweet and tasted chalky.  I’ve had them since the summer, but I thought that stuff was sort of non-perishable.  Apparently not.  Thank god my roommate Alex came up and insisted on eating the crumbs, otherwise I wouldn’t have found out about the mystery flavour until post-baking.  Not good.

So in the end, here was the anatomy of the cake:
– Graham cracker cake (recipe adapted from Annie’s Eats)
– Melted marshmallow*
– Chocolate glaze
– Graham cracker crumbs

*HOLY melted marshmallows have the sticking power of Krazy Glue.  I almost permanently pasted several kitchen utensils to the counter.  Once I melted the little buggers and tried to spread out the marshy layers with my fingers, I very quickly learned that I either had to find some way to (pardon my language) lubricate my fingers otherwise suffer a sudden tragic death from marshmallow stickyness.  For said lubrication, margarine was very handy.  Thank you greasy fats.

PS: Halloween wrap-up post to come tomorrow!


Pizza Awesome

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

NAME CREDIT: Ariel Hartman.

I couldn’t think of a title for this post, and I tried googling all the ingredients and the interweb gave me no ideas.  In a moment of panic, Ariel forced me to call it this.  Apologies.  (she is now saying the title like a valley girl)

Before we start, an admittance of guilt: I feel absolutely horrible that I haven’t blogged for nearly a week.  I’ve had so much school work to do, and I shouldn’t even be blogging right now…  Lets be honest, I really just needed to stop doing work for two seconds.  Last night I made a cake (which will be my next post) and tonight, a pizza.  Sometimes a girl just needs to eat.

Alright, on to the actual post…

Guess what everyone?  WE GOT A BREAD MAKER!!!  Ariel had been telling us for months that she was going to get her mom to send us the one they never used and we finally got it delivered all the way from B.C. earlier this week.  It just so happens that this is the same bread maker that we have at home, so whenever the little thing churns, I get super nostalgic for the times when my mom would make fresh bread when I was young (I would always pick away at the bread before we were supposed to eat it, that’s why there were always holes in the crust, sorry mom).

Anyways, since I have been dying to use this miracle machine for a while now, I decided making pizza dough in it was the best way to begin my bread maker adventures.  Britt found a great recipe online and we decided to go splitsies on the dough and make two different delicious kinds of pizza.

I was originally planning on making a margarita pizza, but considering I’m not a huge fan of basil (the main ingredient in this kind of pizza) I decided to sort of improvise on this recipe.  I splurged on a delicious $8 mozzarella ball which melted into the most smooth yet chewy perfect cheese I have ever eaten in my life.  When I arranging the ingredients on this pizza I was being slightly ridiculous, perfectly aligning the spinach and peppers in a circular flower pattern.  Ariel gave me a few weird looks, but in the end I think it worked out for the best!  If you can’t tell from the picture, there is mozza cheese, baby spinach, red peppers, grilled chicken and red onion on the pizza.  Also, I added the red onion just so this pizza didn’t have a Christmas colour theme, but in the end it actually multiplied the tastiness by 10!

Special thanks goes out to Mer-Face (Ariel) for helping hold my pizza while I took pictures of it!  Balancing this baby on the patio wall would not have been easy, so I was mucho grateful!  Also, she got a new profile picture, bonus!


Chunky Rice and Bean Soup

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

This day shall be known from here on in as “Soupy Saturday.”  The reason?  I made the most amazing soup in the universe!  Unlike my past soups which have focused on some sort of vegetable (pea soup, carrot soup) or on recreating a fiesta-in-a-bowl, I wanted to make a soup that just had EVERYTHING.  This Canadian Living soup recipe was perfect to achieve said goal  Also, since our house is absolutely freezing (we are students who are way too cheap to turn on the heat until snow hits the ground), I needed something other than my Snuggie to keep me warm.

This soup was soup-er (HA, get it?) easy to make, and took less than an hour in total to cook.  The only difficulty occurred when I decided to scoff at Canadian Living’s “tested till perfect” mantra, and add three times the amount of rice that the recipe called for.  This was a major mistake, and I had to add about a cup more water to compensate for my ingredient adding through over-excitement.  Due to this extra H2O, I now have enough soup to probably last me until the end of the winter season.  I’ll be keeping a large tupperware of it out (wish me luck trying to fit it in our fridge!) and packaging the leftover soup in cute little single-serving Ziploc bag packages to be eaten on overly lazy days.  Also, I need a thermos to bring things to school, anyone want to buy me one (preferably this or this). :)

Oh wait, one more thing.  I bought this new app for my iPhone (yes, I paid a whole 99 cents for it) that turns my phone into a pinhole camera.  Isn’t that the most wonderful thing you’ve ever heard?!  I took a few pictures of my lunch using that camera as well, and loved the result so much I thought it needed to be shared with you…

Chicken Squash Curry

~ Hilary ~ 3 Comments

Alright, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been eating 100 per cent well lately.  It is absolutely crazy at school right now (I feel like all the other university students out there can feel my pain) and I just haven’t had time to take care of myself at all.  For example, this past Monday the only thing I ate was a bagel (sesame seed toasted with strawberry cream cheese, the only way to go), a piece of lemon poppy seed loaf from Starbucks, a Vitamin water and a piece of leftover brownie cake.  I managed to get in all four food groups, right?

WELL, by the time Tuesday rolled around, I was craving actual food.  I’m sorry that this is another post featuring squash as the main-ish ingredient but lets face it, I am one person, with one squash.  No matter how many times I feed my roommates (Ariel has been benefitting quite greatly from my cooking lately), it still takes me three times as long to finish one thing.  This being said, you can expect some sort of “stuffed squash” dish over the next few days, unless I follow Brittany’s suggestions and bake something.

Okay, so this Chicken Squash Curry was something I found when browsing the Canadian Living website the other day, in search of a way to use up my inhuman amount of squash.  Since this recipe also allowed me to use the mild Indian curry sauce that has been sitting in our fridge for months, I decided to go for it.  Mmmm, I forgot how good curry sauce smells when you cook it.  I was happy to smell like a little Indian food restaurant for the rest of the day.  To pay tribute to how crazy even this day was, my cooking was interrupted halfway through by a telephone interview I needed to perform for journalism.  Luckily for me, onion and green peppers don’t mind sitting in a pan half cooked…

Anyways, before you motor on over to your kitchen to cook this, I must add that I used (a) green peppers instead of chili green peppers and (b) didn’t add in as much cilantro because I think it is kind of yucky.  So be cautious.  Also, leftover curry makes some delicious rice wraps (especially when mixed with leftover couscous from the roommates).  Now that I have said that, go forth and eat.

Chocolate Brownie Turtle Cake

~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Mom: if you’re worried as to why I’m posting this at 11:30 at night, it’s because this is the only free second I have had today.  As much as you say blogging should not be my priority, I can’t help it, and this cake needed to be shared with the world.  I will sleep soon, green tea is making me drowsy.

This past Sunday night I was all prepared to make a nice end-of-the-weekend dinner for myself, and was pleasantly surprised when I found out that Natalie’s dad was in town and was making all the roomies supper!  Seeing that I could no longer make dinner, and obviously wanting to show off my culinary skills to an outside audience, I knew I had no choice but to make dessert.

I had post-it noted this recipe from way back in the summer.  It is from my 1980’s Canadian Living family cookbook and is so old that it can’t even be found on the website’s recipe index.  With no picture to go off of and the request for loads of chocolate, I went into this one blind-sighted, on nothing but a wing and a prayer.  I don’t think I’ve ever bought so many packages of Baker’s chocolate squares (two boxes of semi-sweet and an unsweetened box).  The amount of chocolate I had at my check-out could only be matched by the amount I once bought to make my gluten-free chocolate cake. Mind blowing.  This recipe also incorporated a beloved Duff family chocolate: the turtle.  For as long as I can remember my parents have shipped over boxes of turtles to my relatives in Ireland for Christmas (can you believe they don’t have them?!), and this cake was just like a walk down memory lane.

Now I don’t know why, but I always seem to insist on making some sort of complicated layer cake, which requires baking, chilling, heating and freezing.  This being said, this cake was under progress the entire day.

Anatomy of the Cake:
Layer 1: delicious brownie
Layer 2: crushed pecans (only because I totally forgot to mix them in with the brownies, my bad!)
Layer 3: melted caramels
Layer 4: chocolate glaze garnished with pecan halves

The result of this dessert was chocolate comas all around the table and an overall hyper state of mind.  To put things into perspective, this is how high on sugar some of us were:

Overall rating: delicious, but in SMALL quantities.  I could take the chocolate rush because I am used to frequent sugar fixes, but poor Brittany (amateur!) was suffering from a chocolate hangover for a full day.  Be wary, non-chocoholics.