Pool Party Cake (!!!!!!!)

July 22, 2010January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 9 Comments

Before I begin this post, I feel it is important to note the following:

What you will see below is the cake of my childhood dreams. When I was young, my mom had a copy of Canadian Living’s “Kids in the Kitchen“cookbookwhich I would flip through occasionally, wondering how in the world one was able to cook. Now, a decade later, I return to my humble beginnings to complete the pièce de résistance of all Canadian Living cakes: The Pool Party Cake(each word deserves a capital letter because, to me, it is a holy entity of awesome). To be honest, I’m a little surprised my mom didn’t make me this cake as a child; I guess there were very few pool parties to go to in Northern Ontario and my birthday was in winter…

When I first heard back in June that we were planning to have a potluck at work, I very nearly had a happiness heart attack. I KNEW that the time had finally come for me to make this cake, and that the world was finally prepared to be exposed to its sheer wonder. Also, the cake kind of doubled as a surprise birthday cake for one of my wonderful work supervisors, Jeremy, who was (against his will) getting a belated birthday celebration at lunch.

Let the cake-making begin: Buying all the candy supplies was the hard part – I spent a solid half hour in the Bulk Barn, carefully measuring out gummy candies and determinedly marching up and down the aisles in search of the elusive vanilla wafer cookie (turns out I needed to get them at Walmart). A short time later, my shopping was complete, and with my new 9×13 glass cake pan filled with goodies, I waltzed (bused) home, anxiously wondering what the results of my cake attempt would be. Due to some sort of miracle, the cake turned out perfectly. Despite a minor meltdown that occurred when a deep crack developed through the middle of the cake, the process was rather uneventful and my neuroses was kept at bay for the most part…

Of course, my adventure to deliver cake to potluck continued this morning when I had to find a way to transport said item to school. Normally I would just ride my bike, however, I had invested too much time and emotion in this cake to see it slide off my handlebars and run over by my Schwinn bicycle. And so, my worried ass took a cab to school and, in an attempt to pay the driver with my debit card, almost granted the cake a death-by-debit-console-falling-in-pool disaster. Luckily, everything except my sanity made it to work in one piece.

I would also like to note one final thing: if someone on Ace of Cakes somehow stumbles on this post, please give me a job and/or let me tour your shop. I promise I would only freak out a little.

Hilary and Cake: an intimate moment. Also, note the wafer cookie entering my mouth…this was because of a failure in cake architecture that caused several half-wafer pieces to come unattached from their other sides. Beware future cake-makers.

Some happy potluck-ers/amazing co-workers, pre-cake arrival, pre-food coma.

Arrival of cake for the birthday boy!

Happy Belated Jeremy!
(Thank you Iman and your ever-speedy facebook uploads for these last two pictures)

END OF STORY? I am addicted to making cakes. Next time, I try conquering fondant.

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry

July 21, 2010January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

Well I have finally gotten sick of all the salads I’ve been making.

Even though all the salad main dishes I’ve made over the past two weeks have been delicious and healthy, I was craving something a little more substantial for last night’s dinner. Searching through pages and pages of chicken recipes on Canadian Living’s website, I finally stumbled on this one for a chicken noodle stir fry. Since this recipe was only the second stir fry I have ever made, I wasn’t 100% sure of how well it would work out. All the ingredients were really simple, EXCEPT for baby bok choy. Waltzing through the produce section of the grocery store, I found a tag for normal adult bok choy. Alas, the adult’s baby was nowhere to be found, and I had to settle for using defrosted spinach as a disappointingly wilted alternative.

With the chicken marinated in a tasty soy sauce/sesame seed oil/garlicy mixture, and the added honey hoisin sauce at the end, this dish satisfied my every dinner desire.

Gord’s Dinner, Part Three: Chocolate Volcano Cake

July 20, 2010January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

BY FAR THE MOST DELICIOUS, DELICATE AND DIFFICULT THING I HAVE EVER MADE. I am so proud.

I’ll keep this short and sweet. In my mind, these chocolate volcano cakes are the Holy Grail of dessert and, being a self-proclaimed chocoholic, I knew I would go to extreme measures to ensure that they were completed perfectly. The recipe was from Canadian Living, obviously, and the preparation instructions originally scared me to death.

Here are a few things I learned from these cakes/morsels from heaven:

1. How to separate the yolk from the egg white
1a. When you continuously blend egg whites, a heavenly, peaked mixture comes into existence. I knew this happened, I have just never experienced the magic before.
2. These cakes are called volcano cakes for a reason. One of them blew up as I tried to pick it up. My counter consequently suffered a chocolate flash flood.
3. A set of six ramekin dishes for $9 is the best investment a girl can make.
3a. I need a second job to afford all the extra dishes I am buying to make my food plating a pretty process.
4. The picture below DOES NOT do this cake justice. If I could include a scratch-and-eat feature on wordpress, I swear you would all love me.

Gord’s Dinner, Part Two: Mini Quiches

July 19, 2010January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

At approximately 5:30 p.m. on Sunday evening, I decided that a salad could not possibly be enough for dinner (despite what Canadian Living said about it being a “main course dish”). With such thought, I promptly began to mildly freak out, whipping open every cookbook in sight in an attempt to find something else to make. Gord was due for dinner an exact hour after this breakdown occurred.

Since I am writing this post, I’m sure you have all guessed that I successfully managed to make a supplementary dish for dinner. Inspired by a recipe for mini quiche lorraines in one of our house cookbooks, I quickly went to work creating my own spinoff of the classic recipe. It was easy-peasy, and basically consisted of me lining greased muffin tins with pre-made pie crust, shoving some sandwich meat (ham) and mozzarella cheese in the base, and filling the rest of the tin up with an egg and milk mixture. Sprinkle fresh chives on the top, and voila – an appetizer! For once, I am extremely grateful for my overheated, possessed student oven, as it cooked these quiches in a record breaking 20 minutes.

And they were GOOD. Quiche is probably one of my favourite foods, and the fact that I whipped these up in an hour makes me giddy with delight. Nom, nom, nom, nom!

Gord’s Dinner, Part One: Chickpea Tabbouleh Salad

July 18, 2010January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

(Eeeee, it has been a week since I last posted, apologies!)

……..

To celebrate the completion of my tofu challenge a few weeks ago, my good friend and fellow blogger Gord made me a delicious dinner of quinoa salad, gazpacho and creme brule (see a few posts back for the scrumptious results). This meal started a pattern of what I now call “reward dinners,” where each of us cooks for the other when a challenge is completed. Gord’s very first challenge was to make a pie from scratch, and the result was an amazing strawberry rhubarb pie, a dish whose tastes boggled my mind one afternoon after a long day in the office (I ate it in a record-breaking two minutes). To honour the completion of his challenge, I knew I had to make Gord a dinner that was just as, if not more delicious than the dinner he made for me.

Knowing that Gord is way more into vegetables than I am, I knew this supper had to incorporate a fair share of legumes. I also happen to know that Gord likes chickpeas. With these two checkpoints in mind, I flipped through my Canadian Living Everyday Favourites cookbook, and found the perfect recipe: chickpea tabbouleh salad. The salad is apparently a Lebanese delicacy, and used bulgur, something that I have been curious to cook with for sometime now. Since I obviously didn’t know what bulgur was before making this recipe (I simply liked that it rhymed with “vulgur”), I have decided to include the Bulk Barn definition below, should anyone also be confused as to what this strange sounding food is:

Bulgur (noun) – bulgur is made from soft wheat kernels that have been cooked, dried and then cracked; thus “cooking” it is simply a matter of rehydration…

Now that we all know what bulgur is, let me just sum up this post by saying that the salad was great, with a lemon dressing and crunchy cucumber (even if there were a few too many vegetables for my liking). The only thing I didn’t like were the tomatoes (raw tomatoes are my greatest enemy, next to tofu), but I simply included them for Gord’s benefit. Alas, they added a gorgeous red colour, which I must admit to loving.