I Had My Husband Pose With This In Front Of His Groin For Added Effect

"candle salad"

That's what SHE said.

Would YOU make it? Could you eat it with a straight face if someone served it to you?

I wish I could say that this was one of those crazy retro recipes from a 1960's or '70's publication, back when everyone was into free love and whatnot, but alas, it is from the December 2010 Penzey's Spice catalog.

RETRO BANANA PEEN WITH LETTUCE IS BACK IN STYLE, EVERYONE!

Review: Cranberry-Orange-Nut Cookie Bars

I used the cranberry-orange-nut-cookies recipe found at that link (recipe copied below in case it ever disappears from their site) to make our dessert tonight.



Changes I made to the recipe:

I didn't feel like dealing with cookies tonight, so I made them into bars in a 9X13 pan instead. I just sprinkled the 3T of sugar over the top of the bars before cooking. I also used nonstick cooking spray on the pan instead of parchment paper.

The dough is very sticky and I did have to use a small piece of parchment paper to spread and press it into the pan; it was sticking to the spatula and would have been a MESS if I'd used my fingers.

Cooking time for the bars was increased; I cooked mine for 22 minutes and upon cutting them, they were still somewhat gooey. Could definitely use a little more time. I left them in the pan to cool rather than removing them after a minute.

Batter:

The batter was VERY tasty! Sweet and citrusy, with a nice nuttiness. And there are no raw eggs to worry about either! (Not that we wouldn't eat it anyway if it DID have them, but we like to flirt with death around these parts.) As mentioned though, it is very sticky, even after being refrigerated for half an hour.

Family feedback:

K-Pidge: The bars rose quite a bit more than I expected them to; that was nice. The 3T of sugar on top was a bit too much (not in flavor; I have quite the sweet tooth, much to my diabetic regret!); there was plenty still rolling around when I shook it gently after baking. I will try cutting back to 2T of sugar next time. These bars, even slightly undercooked, were DELICIOUS! OH MY GOODNESS. I wouldn't change a thing, except maybe the aforementioned cutting back of the sprinkled sugar, and cooking them a tad longer. SO GOOD. The doubled bar-portion is really generous too; I was very happy with just one.

Mr. K-Pidge: Reserves his final say for the next time when we allow them to cook a little more fully, but otherwise they receive high marks. Flavor is great. "I wouldn't mind if you made these more often," he says. He wouldn't change anything per se, but noted "chocolate chips... chocolate chips would KICK ASS."

Boy K-Pidge (6): These are great! Make them again, don't change anything.

Girl K-Pidge (4): Has thus far refused to try them out of sheer orneriness.

Frugality Rating:

By turning it into bars, I cut the number of servings in half, from 30 to 15. That changes the cost differential a little; but also, let's be realistic. The cookie serving was ONE cookie. Who eats just one cookie?! That's right, NO ONE. So a doubled-up bar is probably more realistic anyway. Outside of that... this is a pretty simple home-baked good. It relied largely on ingredients I already had on hand, and it didn't use all of any of these items, meaning it would take a whole lot of math for me to figure out the exact cost of each bar, BUT, I'm guessing it's 50 cents or less a piece. Pretty frugal dessert, if you can keep yourself from eating the whole pan! But even if you DID eat the whole pan, it was probably only about $7 or so. Not too shabby.

Health rating:

The eatingwell.com site says the nutritionals for one cookie are as follows: Per cookie: 102 calories; 5 g fat (0 g sat, 1 g mono); 0 mg cholesterol; 15 g carbohydrates; 1 g protein; 1 g fiber; 94 mg sodium; 24 mg potassium.

(I haven't figured out how to examine our diet for proper levels of fat, protein and carbs yet, exactly. I mostly count calories to try and lose weight, but since I'd like to change the QUALITY of the food we're eating, I'll need to figure that part out eventually.)

Now, since I halved the serving amount, you'd need to double that per bar. So 204 calories per bar, which isn't too bad for a snack (again, if you only eat one!). Diabetes-wise, that jumps it 30g carbs, which is about double where I want to be for a snack. All things in moderation.

Reheat rating:

It's a cookie-bar. It should freeze pretty well, I'd think. I threw one in the freezer to test at a later date. As far as making ahead and how long they'll last, eatingwell.com says this: Make Ahead Tip: Prepare the dough through Step 2, cover and refrigerate for up to 3 days. Store the cookies in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 5 days. So, this should be a pretty good holiday treat recipe, since it can be prepared ahead of time. I will report back on how well the frozen cooked version held up!

I did not reserve any batter to freeze, but I bet this would hold up quite well in the freezer too. It doesn't have any ingredients that really don't freeze well (such as eggs). I will explore this theory at a later date, perhaps closer to the holidays.

Is it a keeper?

OH MY YES. It was delicious. Five out of five spoons. A definite win!

Recipe in case it ever disappears from the eatingwell.com site:

INGREDIENTS
1 1/2 cups whole-wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup chopped dried cranberries
1 cup plus 3 tablespoons sugar, divided
1/2 cup smooth, unsweetened applesauce
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tablespoon freshly grated orange zest
3 tablespoons orange juice

PREPARATION
Whisk flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Stir in walnuts and dried cranberries.
Whisk 1 cup sugar, applesauce, oil, orange zest and juice in a medium bowl until smooth. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet ingredients. Mix until well blended. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a nonstick baking mat.
Put the remaining 3 tablespoons sugar into a small flat-bottomed dish or pan. Roll the dough with floured hands (it will be very moist) into 1 1/2-inch balls, then roll in sugar to coat. Place 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheet.
Bake the cookies until barely golden brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool on the pan for 1 minute; transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

This is part of K-Pidge's efforts to feed her family healthier, more nutritious foods. For all posts in the K-Pidge Healthy Family Project, click here.

Scooby-Doo Cake Pops

Has anyone ever tried their hand at Bakerella's cake pops? I have always wanted to, ever since learning about them, and I finally gave it a try last night.

As Tina Turner sings at the beginning of Proud Mary, I never, ever do anything nice and easy. I always do it nice, and ROUGH. In other words, I always see a project I'd like to do and think 'hey, that looks awesome! I bet I could do it AND make these improvements / modifications!' And then I set out to do just that, without ever bothering to try it the easy way first and LEARN what I'm doing.

So not only did I attempt to make cake pops for the first time, I attempted to make them in the shape of Scooby-Doo heads, AND I did this while planning on serving them as the treats for my daughter's preschool class today. No practice runs for me!



I definitely ran into some snags along the way. For one thing, I think I used too much frosting; my cake balls were pretty gooey, even after being in the fridge / freezer. Very hard to work with. For another, I'm wondering if my choice of buttercream frosting contributed to some loss of integrity; Bakerella SEEMS to primarily use cream cheese frosting. My cake pops were very sweaty. I don't know if it's because they were too moist, or if it was the frosting, or what. I also had trouble with the candy melts. They melted but they were VERY thick. I had to add a TON of vegetable shortening, MUCH more than the package recommended, to make it liquidy / pourable / drippable. (Oh yeah, I'd never ever used candy melts before in my life either.) I bought edible decorating pens to draw details on Mr. Doo, but the pops were so sweaty that wasn't really working out, and so I used gel frosting and then I was afraid to wrap them in the little plastic bags I'd bought for them because I didn't want it to smear.

All in all, sort of a disaster. But they looked OK when they were done. I certainly learned a lot along the way. They were recognizable, the kids loved them, and adults that have seen them have seemed impressed (or they're just trying to make me feel better!). And most importantly, they TASTE DELICIOUS. Which is really what's important when it comes to treats.

"Scooby Doo and the Mystery of the Messy Cake Pops"

You start by baking a cake, and then letting it cool completely.


Make up a batch of frosting, or buy a can of premade frosting (also something Bakerella does a lot, and maybe that frosting has a better consistency too; I shall have to experiment. Oh, darn.) I used Wilton's buttercream icing recipe. It may have been too moist. Or too wet. I don't know. I might have just used too much. So many variables!


Crumble up your completely cooled cake, then add some frosting and mix it together. You need just enough frosting to make it sticky, I think; this was WAY too moist. I did not follow the cardinal rule of "you can always add more but you can't take away".


Make some balls out of that stuff. I rolled mine by hand. They were REALLY sticky at first (another sign that I'd made them too moist), so I did my best, froze them for 15 minutes, re-rolled them, and stuck them back in the freezer for ten minutes, then put them in the fridge.


I forgot to buy candies that would make good ears and noses (because I also have a tendency to go off half-cocked and not make a complete plan when I start experimenting), so I had to make do with what I had in the house. Candy corn. I chopped the yellow bottoms off for noses, and split the remaining triangle for ears.


Then I started making Scooby-like shapes. This was REALLY hard. At first it was hard because I wasn't sure WHAT a Scooby-like shape would be, even though I had printed a picture of his head as a guide. Eventually I got into a rhythm and got that part down (mostly). THEN it was hard because the balls were so damn sticky, I had to keep them in the freezer. I had two pans of them rotating in and out of the freezer; I'd do a couple of shapes from one pan, stick it back in the freezer, do a couple shapes from the other pan, and keep going back and forth. I'm pretty sure Bakerella has never had to do that.
Another thing I would do differently is I would use some of the candy melts as 'glue' for the candy pieces. Most of them stayed in place OK, but several of them slipped during the dipping process. Also, the noses were virtually unnecessary at the end. What I would have LIKED to do is use a chocolate chip on the outside of the nose, but as I mentioned, I forgot to buy candy supplies, and I happened to be out of chocolate chips. Woe.
On the plus side, placing the candies when I did helped me get a better idea of what he was going to look like and how to shape the heads properly.


Dipping. What can I say about dipping? It was fun. It was tasty. It was a pain in the ass. The melts were VERY thick, I really had to thin out the chocolate with a lot of Crisco to make it work. It was a little hard to get the hang of the dipping, tapping off the excess, and making it smooth at first. The ears didn't always stay in place. Sometimes I moved the cake pops too much in the melts and they fell off their sticks. I tested a few plain old cake balls and they were MUCH easier. Irregular shapes = harder to dip. Also, the smoother the shapes stayed, the better the finished products looked, which meant more transferring to and from the freezer so they didn't get too mushy.


Collars. I didn't thin the melts for the collars because I decided to just sort of paint them on. My original plan was to take the pops off the sticks, dip the bottoms for the collars, and then put them back on the sticks (as Bakerella did for her Winnie The Pooh pops), but after going through this whole process, I'm pretty sure my mushy cake balls would NEVER have stayed on the sticks if I'd done that, so I went with the "paint on the collars" process. It looked ok.


As I mentioned earlier, my pops were sweating quite a bit, and so the edible ink pens I bought for drawing on his details just weren't really working. So I turned to gel icing.

soulless creepy Scooby faces!

aaaaand, that's about as good as it gets.


So, I learned a lot from my first cake pop adventure, and I look forward to my next trial run! If anyone out there had made their own cake pops, I'd like to hear how your attempts turned out. What worked and what didn't? Any tips you can share to help me alleviate some of the problems I had this time around?

- baked with love by K-Pidge

Turkish Feast: Muhallebi

Eat dessert first; that's my motto. Actually, as a diabetic, that can't exactly be my motto, but I'm going to talk about a Turkish dessert to start off our discussions of Turkish feast!

The suggested dessert recipe was Muhallebi, or Turkish milk pudding... who doesn't love pudding? I'd never made pudding on my own, but it sounded easy enough.  Melt butter in a pot, add flour, stir for a few minutes; add milk and sugar, stir until thick. Here is where I faltered a bit. Stir until thick? Thick as a fat girl's thigh? How would I know when to stop? The recipe didn't say. I ended up stirring for about 15 minutes, until it looked like it was about as thick as Jell-O instant pudding looks when you first mix the powder into the milk. (Yes, that is my ONLY experience with making pudding. What a sad reference point. I know. I KNOW.) I hoped it would firm up as it cooled.


desperately trying to figure out if it looks THICK yet.

Once it looked 'thick' enough to me, I lowered the heat and cooked for 4 more minutes, then added the vanilla and cooked for one more minute. I poured it all into one big glass bowl, rather than several small ones, because it was easier, and I'm all about easier. I let it cool on the counter for a little while, then put plastic wrap on the top and chilled it in the fridge for about four hours.


finished Muhallebi. I hoped, anyway.

It did thicken up a bit more, but it was still fairly watery. The flavor was good; light and sweet and creamy and definitely reminiscent of pudding (I consider that a success!). The cinnamon on top of each serving really complemented the dish; I highly recommend NOT skipping that step.

I will try cooking it a little longer next time, because I think it could use to thicken up a bit more. I was worried about overcooking the pudding, which is why I stopped, but it definitely could have used a little more time on the heat. Maybe five more minutes. So aim for 15-20 minutes as your thickening time, then lower the heat and cook for 4 more minutes before adding the vanilla. If anyone tries it, let me know how that turns out for you!


That's Mr. K-Pidge dishing up some pudding.

Muhallebi (Turkish Milk Pudding)

INGREDIENTS
5 cups milk
1½ cup sugar
5 tbsp flour
1 stick butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
Cinnamon

DIRECTIONS
In a pot, sautee butter and flour over medium heat for about 2-3 minutes. Then stir in milk and sugar and stir continuously. Then stir till the pudding becomes thick (about 15 minutes), turn heat low and cook for 3-4 minutes. Add the vanilla, stir for about 1 minute to incorporate, then turn the heat off.
Transfer the Milk Pudding into glass or porcelain cups and let it cool. Garnish with cinnamon.
ENJOY

(PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ORIGINAL RECIPE GIVES THIS WARNING: Do not sprinkle the cinnamon right after you pour the pudding into bowls. This would let the microorganisms grow fast contacting the cinnamon with the hot surface of the pudding and this may lead to food borne diseases. Make sure you sprinkle the cinnamon just before serving the cooled pudding.)




I am participating in the Global Cook Along project, where we try recipes from around the world. We focus on one region's cuisine each week. We try to do ours as one big potluck-style meal each week, but other people are doing one meal a night, a week, whatever works for them! To learn more, see additional recipes, or to participate yourself, check out our livejournal community and / or our facebook group!

with love from K-Pidge :)

Greek Feast, Part Three: Making Your Own Greek Yogurt

Our planned dessert for Greek feast was Greek yogurt with honey and walnuts. We had honey, we had walnuts; we just needed the Greek yogurt! Which I wasn't able to find at my local grocery store. There are plenty of recipes out there for making your own yogurt, where you actually MAKE the yogurt. But there is also an easy shortcut for 'making' your own Greek yogurt. Just buy whole milk plain yogurt at the store and drain the whey out of it. This will result in the creamier, less bitter, thicker, delicious Greek yogurt that we desire. (You will also need it for the tzatziki sauce, so be sure to make extra if you plan on eating some of it!)

To make your own Greek yogurt at home, you will need:

* a container of whole milk PLAIN yogurt (quantity will vary depending on how much you need; remember you will be straining liquid out of it so you will end up with less, overall, than you start with)
* some clean food-grade cheesecloth (can be found in most grocery stores)
* A strainer or colander
* A bowl to catch the whey as it drains

Set your colander on top of the bowl. Line it with four layers of clean food-grade cheesecloth. Open your yogurt container (save the container!) and dump it on top of the cheesecloth. Fold the top layers of cheesecloth over it gently and pop it back into the fridge. You're going to want to let it sit and drain, slowly, for about 12 hours to get the right consistency. You can check it a little before and a little after; when it's thick enough to pop a spoon in and have the spoon stay upright, it's good to go. (We drained ours for 12 hours.) If it gets a little too thick, you can always re-incorporate some of the whey. It's a pretty forgiving process.


Greek yogurt on the right, whey on the left.

That's all there is to it! When it's ready, put the yogurt back into its original container and store it in the fridge. Great for dips and some people, like my husband, love to eat it plain. You can also treat it as a dessert by topping it with honey and walnuts or a variety of fruits. Quick, easy, healthy, delicious.




I am participating in the Global Cook Along project, where we try recipes from around the world. We focus on one region's cuisine each week. We try to do ours as one big potluck-style meal each week, but other people are doing one meal a night, a week, whatever works for them! To learn more, see additional recipes, or to participate yourself, check out our livejournal community and / or our facebook group!

with love from K-Pidge :)