Hilary makes dessert

Martha Stewart’s outrageous chocolate cookies

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

I warned you that this was going to be a Martha Stewart week.

These cookies have become a bit of a tradition among my group of friends. To understand the tradition, you must first understand my friend Amanda, for whom I made these cookies. Amanda loves her birthday. Loves it. More than a small child loves puppies and more than I love cheese. She always has a week’s worth of birthday festivities, appropriately called “Amandapalooza.”

Amanda and I on one of her birthday nights

It is my job, as old roommate and friend, to bake something for her. Last year I made these white chocolate Macadamia nut cookies for the first time. This year she had another cookie request. These.

Cookies + Instagram = Love

As far as I know, Amanda’s love for these cookies started on her birthday last year, when our old roommate Brittany (SHE IS IN PARIS NOW, GO LOOK AT HER BLOG!!) made her a batch. They are actually the perfect cookie – slightly crunchy on the outside and chewy and soft on the inside (so long as you don’t over bake them which I accidentally did with a batch of these…). They’re like a tiny brownie cookie, but better. A recipe like this obviously uses up a lot of chocolate, so it’s certainly a good thing that I always have an absurd amount on hand.

Since this was the second year in a row that the cookies were made, I declare it a tradition.

A tradition which I may whip up and eat solo in my bedroom once in awhile.

Heh.

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Tuxedo cupcakes with candy bow ties

~ Hilary ~ 5 Comments

Sometimes I am ridiculous. I present to you Exhibit A:

Really though, my obsession with baking hits a high whenever I am invited to any get together that is even vaguely themed. This week’s party? A classy-themed shindig planned by a fellow fourth-year journalism student, Joel (for those who follow my comments, he was the one who identified the correct way to pluralize stegosaurus).

Cupcakes are my go-to “bring to a party and have everyone fawn over you and be impressed” food, but things have gotten challenging lately. The challenge: I have made a countless number of cupcake recipes already (see my cupcake category in the drop down menu on the right), meaning that creativity has been ever the more difficult to uncover. Google, which is normally a constant source of inspiration, failed me this time around. If you enter the term “classy cupcake” you stumble on more tragically named bakeries than anything else.

What I’m saying is that extensive brainstorming went into finding the perfect cupcake for this party. At first, I thought of doing something infused with champagne, before realizing that I was far too lazy to go buy a bottle and that the resulting purchase would likely just throw me into a tizzy of early morning alcoholism. I thought of dipping strawberries in chocolate, stuffing raspberries with a ganache, mixing finely chopped mint leaves into a decadent filling… None of the combinations were quite right. Nor did I have time for them.

My guardian angel of the week, Martha Stewart, saved the day. One of my searches landed me on her slideshow of fancy cupcakes. I was clicking through photo after photo, bleary eyed and getting increasingly disgusted by the hypothetical pool of drool that was being induced by the pictured cupcakes. Then, just like that, it happened. I found the perfect solution to my problem. It was slide number 18 out of 30. Candy-Bow-Tie Cupcakes. Be still my beating heart.

Everything was a breeze from here. I quickly whipped up a plain chocolate cupcake batter, and baked 20 cupcakes with perfectly rounded tops. Then the real fun began: it was bow tie making time.

Aside: Why does bow tie have a space between words, while necktie is all one word? It seems unfair to me. 

These candy bow ties were made with fruit by the foot candy, purchased at my handy dandy local corner store. I LOVED completely hated that I bought too many rolls, and my attentive bow tie, er, tying, was accompanied by the inhaling of nearly 15 feet of candy fun. We will not discuss the sugar crash that followed.

The bow tie making process is a little complicated to explain in words, and the instructions Martha (bless her soul) gives are not the easiest to follow. And so, I present my first video tutorial, made mid-sugar crash with a hairstyle that has been ruined by a morning of incessant head-in-the-oven cupcake checking. Please don’t judge. Update: Yep, there is most definitely an issue with lip-word co-ordination in this video. I blame my four-year-old laptop and the fact that it was running on reserve battery power at the time. Bear with me. Update 2: Oh god that’s a terrible screen capture.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/35851729 w=500&h=400]
I woke up at 7 a.m. on Friday morning to make the mint buttercream icing for the cupcakes (once again, I am so grateful for the silence of my new Kitchenaid hand mixer). Freya and I have a new roommate, who has already noticed that we bake way more than the average people. She came downstairs on Friday to the sight of me making Oreo cookie crumb suits for my cupcakes. I am not helping my cause, am I?

Anyways, the result was adorable, I thought. These are definitely one of the top five favourite things that I’ve made. Suit up!

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Chocolate cherry cupcakes with a Smarties cream cheese icing (Happy Birthday Ariel!)

~ Hilary ~ 6 Comments

What a flavour combination, huh?

Don’t give me that look because you think I’m crazy for combining cherries and Smarties. I know the look. It’s something like this:

Okay, let’s be real. I just wanted an excuse to post this picture. I’m sure you guys aren’t ACTUALLY making a face at me. Right? RIIIIGHT?

Well whatever. They were good. I’ll admit, I never thought the three things would ever be combined. That all changed, however, once I took a trip (well several trips, actually. About once a week for all of second and third year…) to my friendly neighbourhood Dairy Queen with my good friend Ariel.

Here’s the backstory: As one of her several high school jobs, Ariel had a stint serving ice cream at DQ. When you’re a teenager and left fairly unattended in a large, ice cream shop, what choice do you have but try different flavour combinations? Read: LETS THROW EVERYTHING INTO THE BLIZZARD MAKER, GUYS. I had a similar experience when I worked at Starbucks in grade 12 and we made a lemon poppy seed loaf frappuccino…

But anyways, this post is not about getting Ariel and I indicted for the mischievous things we did with industrial powered mixers in high school. Nope, this post is about belatedly celebrating Ariel’s birthday, which she was not in Ottawa for.

And what better way to celebrate then to transform her favourite kind of blizzard into cupcake form?

I was very wary as to how these would turn out. I’ve never used/bought/eaten cherry pie filling before, and was concerned as to how it would affect the batter. To play things safe, I strained the actual cherries into a bowl and the result underneath was a giant goop of something that looked like cough syrup mixed with zombie blood.

There was about a cup of this liquid-y goo

Though these cupcakes didn’t rise to become mountainous domes, they were moist and had scattering of cherry. My other old roommate Alex said they were good enough to be a wedding cake! The Smarties cream cheese icing reminded me of Smarties ice cream and was the perfect topping to these rich, chocolatey cupcakes. Blizzard transformation: complete.

Please pardon the lack of photos – I was in a rush to get to the actual birthday party!

Pulverization is best served by the pounding of a meat cleaver

PS: a third-year journalism student at Carleton swung by my baking session to interview me for her multimedia class. I posed awkwardly with my hand mixer which I described as the “love of my life” way too many times.

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Cara cara orange and raspberry galette with a gingerbread crust

~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

I know what you’re wondering.

What the hell is a cara cara orange?

I was asking the exact same question a few short days ago.

Here’s how it started. I went out with the intention of making of a blood orange and clementine galette, but, since I’m in Sudbury right now, some foods are a little more difficult to find at the grocery store than others. To make a long story short: there were most definitely no blood oranges in stock. I blame the city’s “only the meat and potatoes” offering and, I suppose, the fact that blood oranges aren’t technically in season until mid-January.

After calling around to a few different stores, including Sudbury’s only specialty fruit shop, it was determined that there were no blood oranges in the entire city. I gave up on that. There were, however, cara cara oranges at a shop in the city’s south end. A quick Google determined that these types of oranges had a rose hue and evoked notes of cherry, blackberry and rose petal. Oooooo pretty. They would have to do.

I then walked five kilometres to purchase said oranges. Worth it.

Turns out getting the oranges were only half the battle.

From here, I learned a new kitchen method: how to “supreme” a citrus fruit. Catie, the blogger who wrote the recipe that inspired this dessert, was luckily a culinary school graduate who explained the technique (this link is actually SO helpful).

Basically, when you supreme a fruit, you are taking off all the peel and the tough, white membrane that sits directly beneath.

While the technique seems a little difficult to master completely, I think I managed to do a pretty okay job with my four oranges (except the first one, which was a little mangled. That photo will never see the light of the Internet. Trust me, though, it wasn’t pretty). My quarter inch orange slices came out looking like tiny, Japanese blossoms.

The oranges and my late addition of raspberries (I decided that I didn’t want to attempt to supreme a tiny clementine) meshed well with the gingerbread crust that I got from Brittany’s pear gingerbread galette post. Add a dollop of whipped cream and you’re set.

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Peanut butter cupcakes with chocolate buttercream icing

~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

I don’t need to tell anyone twice that peanut butter and chocolate are a masterful combination.

I’ve been experiencing a peanut butter and chocolate (hereon in to be known as PB&C) revival lately, and I completely blame these cookies of Britt’s that she made back in November.

Since I got my hand mixer for Christmas, I’ve been dying to make some sort of cake and take full advantage of its blending powers. I settled (perhaps settled is the wrong word for something that you truly adored) on these peanut butter cupcakes. We were going over to a family friend’s house for supper and I, true to form, offered to bring dessert. I figured peanut butter was a safe bet. These cupcakes also came with a not-too-sweet, semi-improvised icing that I whipped up to satisfy my chocolate craving. Believe it or not, no one in my family likes chocolate in dessert (terrible, I know), so this was pretty much as far as I could go.

As for the actually cake mixing, it was a dream. My hand mixer made the batter a fluffy, peanut butter pillow which scooped like a cotton ball into the tiny white muffin cups. The oil in the peanut butter made the original muffin cups slip off after baking, and so I iced the cupcakes and plopped them back into fresh, slightly smaller ones. We had to get dressed up for dinner, after all.

In the end, these cupcakes were delicious and, surprisingly, not too dense. A PB&C success story.

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