Hilary makes dessert

Family Christmas Party aka Holiday Potluck II

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

Since it’s been awhile since I posted about my last potluck, I figured a new cheerful holiday post was in order.  Just as an update on my life for anyone who teensy bit cares: classes have now officially ended and I am half terrified, half excited that my second last year of university is halfway over.  Seriously!  My actual life starts so soon, I can’t wait.  Also, my first exam isn’t until the 17th, so I have spent the last couple of days doing the following: drinking beer, eating chicken wings, playing Mario Kart, eating (inhaling) sushi, and watching Mean Girls.  As you can see, my life involved quite a bit of eating and not much studying.  As of tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m. that will most certainly change.  Exams, you are going down.

The charming Christmas ornament my mom sent us last year. The blacked out section is our address, which I feel should not be mentioned over the realms of the Internet.

Okay, so ever since we moved into our house, it has become a tradition to have a “Christmas family potluck.”  And by tradition, I mean we had a dinner last year and decided that we needed another excuse to decorate the house for the 2010 festivities.  Since there are six of us in the house plus two boyfriends and a boyfriend roommate, we ended up with quite a bit of food.  There was chicken, ham, potatoes (sweet and normal ones!), stuffing, brussel sprouts (which I wasn’t brave enough to try, I blame my dad for not liking them!) and MORE (if you can believe it).  Finally, there was dessert, which I was obviously responsible for making.  On the menu this year was a double-layered chocolate cake with peppermint white chocolate buttercream icing.  I seriously ate so much for dinner that by the time people came over for our actual party, I just wanted to go down to my room and put on my stretchy pants.  Thank god I resisted.

Regretfully, I did not get a nice picture of my cake since I didn’t finish icing it until well into the depths of 6 p.m. light.  The picture you see below was taken under the lamp Ariel bought at a yard sale.  ‘Nuff said.  I’ll tell you this, however…  It was yummy!  I finally managed to use some of the ridiculous amount of white chocolate that I have and used the rest of my homemade Christmas tree chocolates to decorate the sides.  IT WAS Christmas in a cake.

Christmas dinner as seen from my iPhone

This year’s family get-together also involved a “fancy” holiday party afterwards, at which time we proceeded to drink spiked egg nog and revel in the glow of our sparkling Christmas tree.

We also had our Secret Santa gift exchange.  There are six of us in our house and this year we PROMISED not to try and sneakily match the gift givers with their recipients.  This, however, failed greatly, and after two revealing bus conversations with Ariel and Amanda, I had the entire web of gifting deciphered.  Amanda was my Secret Santa and she got me…wait for it…A COOKIE PRESS!  That’s right, I can now make spritz cookies and pipe icing to my heart’s content.  Best. gift. ever.  I was Ariel’s Secret Santa, and got her the cute polar bear sweater you see below, Christmas tea and a cookie like the one we had from Le Moulin de Provence in first year.  Cute, right?

ALSO, one more thing.  I wore this wicked dress I bought at the Ottawa Vintage Sale a few weeks ago and was DEVASTATED when I got some sort of water stain on the front of it.  Seriously, you can’t take me anywhere!  Hillary’s Cleaners will be having a visit from me very shortly…

The pictures below are just a few more images from my fun night…

 

 

 

 

 

My wonderful Secret Santa

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family picture where we all look a little bit crazy (especially Britt)...
Mass chaos in the kitchen
New favourite channel: The Fireplace Network
Our Christmas tree as seen from my Hipstamatic iPhone app
Family picture 2010

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM OUR FAMILY TO YOURS!!!!

 

Radio Potluck Party aka Christmas Baking Part ONE

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

It is currently 12:23 a.m. and I am sitting at the kitchen table waiting for a chocolate cake to bake.  This cake is for the family potluck (i.e. my six roommates and close friends) are having tomorrow eve.  While I listen to Glee music (which is WAY too peppy for my current mood), I figured I might as well type out a new blog post.  Please excuse me if my sleepiness is greatly apparent within this post.  Grammatical skills depart as the evening goes on.

So today was our last radio class of third year (sob).  Through newsroom days and the rest of the semester our class has gotten pretty close, and I’m hoping that most people will be in Thursday TV next semester so we can have more delicious potlucks.

PAUSE: One of my cake layers just finished baking!!  This is very good news, the other half has now entered the oven and sleep time crawls more and more near by the minute.  Hoorah.

ANYWAYS, back to radio.  Since I baked something for two out of three newsroom days, I figured it was only appropriate to end off the semester with a Christmas-themed potluck.  Also, I actually look for ANY excuse to hold a potluck and was extremely eager to once again display my baking skills to an audience other than my roommates.  At one point in the afternoon, Mary (our professor) actually said: “this is the reason why I don’t believe journalism students are too busy,” or something along those lines… Not true.  I just have ZERO life and spend any time that would normally be consumed by a university student’s social life baking.  It’s an addiction.

Okay, but seriously.  This potluck dealt me the perfect opportunity to begin my Christmas baking.  And so, I spent approximately 10 hours this past Sunday baking to my heart’s content.  Although some people dread it, I LOVE doing this sort of thing and the unfortunate “woman slaving over a hot stove” thing totally applies to me here.  Did I just set feminism back decades?  Apologies.  Let me explain: I’m actually the LEAST domestic person in the universe.  Sure, I love cooking, but I’m not a domestic diva or anything.  Yes, I occasionally answer to the name “Martha Stewart,” but I really want nothing more than independence, adventure, and zero children (until I’m old and have lived my life).  There, perhaps feminism has been restored to its 2010 level.

Okay, so here’s what I made:

1. Peppermint brownie bites
2. Ricotta cookies
3. Chocolate-dipped orange shortbread rounds (don’t these cookies look like little Spock heads?)
4. Gingerbread cupcakes with a cinnamon cream cheese frosting – SO amazing.  The recipe came from the blog Sweet Girl Confections and they were just wonderful.  Thank you so much!

Now, for any Canadian Living fans out there, I can tell you that the top three recipes came from the magazine’s special “Holiday Cooking” edition.  All three were marvelous, but I especially appreciated (a) their freezing ability from Sunday-Thursday, and (b) the fact that CHEESE can be put in cookies.  Fantastic, right?

Also, I made hand-moulded chocolate Christmas trees.  It was fun.

Alright, better check on the other half of my cake.  Later days!

AND the preparation/chaotic packing mess…

Christmas tree farm?

One more thing… In anticipation of tomorrow night’s cake and the blog post to follow it, please just take a look at what my baking looked like last year at this time.  I hope to improve on this times a badgillion.  Yes, the icing did melt off the cake, laugh away.  I’m so ashamed.  On that note, I’ve come a long way, n’est ce pas?


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!


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.

Snickerdoodles: the perfect road trip companion

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

For those of you who were maybe hoping this was some sort of Thanksgiving post, then I must apologize (however one of those will come in the very near future!!).  These cookies were actually made for a road trip that my friends Iman, Kristina, Jase-Face (okay, his actual name is Jasen) and I took to Montreal last weekend.  I wasn’t originally even supposed to go on this little trip, but after I found out that cutest couple in the universe, K & J, were popping over to our neighbouring province, I knew I had to pester them into letting me go.  This being said, I felt semi-guilty for bumming a ride in the car just so I could shop, so I decided I needed to bake something to apologize for my absurd inviting abilities.

Normally when I decide to bake something, I usually lean towards cheesecakes or cupcakes.  Knowing that the first would be rather difficult to cut in a moving vehicle and since I just made the latter, I decided to switch it up a little and try out a new cookie recipe.

This Snickerdoodle recipe came from one of my favourite blogs, Annie’s Eats.  Now in case you’re just as curious as me as to where this silly name comes from (it sounds like it should be followed by a singing of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious“), I did a little bit of searching on my favourite research site (Wikipedia) and came up with this…

“Snickerdoodles are probably German in origin. … The name is probably a corruption of the German word Schneckennudeln, which means “snail cookies.” … Yet another hypothesis suggests that the name has no particular meaning or purpose and is simply a whimsically named cookie that originated from a New England tradition of fanciful cookie names.  There is also a series of tall tales about a hero named “Snickerdoodle” from the early 1900s which may be related to the name of the cookie.”

Anyways, kind of cool!

Baking these cookies for half the time and at 75 degrees less in our oven meant that they were perfect and soft on the inside, with a crunchy, sugary crisp on the outside.  ALSO, look at Annie’s Eats, she actually makes baked goods every single day.  If I were her kids I would LOVE homemade lunches.